Online Newspaper, Television, Radio, Digital Native, and Partisan News Coverage of the Fourth National Climate Assessment

Abstract:

The Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4) was released on November 23, 2018. Congressionally mandated to be produced every four years, the report provides the most compressive analysis to date of the environmental and societal risks that climate change presents to every region and economic sector of the U.S. While the report itself is frequently cited in news coverage of climate change, the release of the report—notably on the day after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday (a.k.a. “Black Friday”)—was a newsworthy event in a year that saw the greatest amount of climate change reporting to date in the U.S. Because NCA4 included a chapter about the climate change impacts to every region of the U.S., it created an exceptional opportunity for localized climate change stories to be simultaneously produced by local, regional, and national news organizations. Consequently, the release of NCA4 created a unique opportunity to study how the news framing of a major climate change report and a nationally newsworthy event 1) evolves over time, 2) differs across a range of news platforms, and 3) varies across different regions of the U.S. Structural topic modeling, a form of unsupervised machine learning that identifies consistent word associations, was used to identify common themes, called topics, in about 5000 news articles that were published in the 50-day period after the release of the report. This study identifies the topics that were prevalent in the news coverage of NCA4, including differences between the nationally syndicated news articles and those produced by local or regional news organizations. Past studies of climate change media content have been mostly limited to print and national-scale news sources. Extending prior research, this study identifies how topics varied by news platform, including local and online newspaper, television, radio, and digital native news sources, as well as left and right leaning partisan sources. Finally, this study investigates where topics found in the news are representative of the key messages identified in each regional chapter of NCA4. The media plays an important role in shaping their audiences’ perceptions of climate change, and this study builds on prior research by painting a more comprehensive picture of the ways climate change is covered in the modern news ecosystem.