by Michael Brüggemann, Hendrik Meyer, Sam Burton-Weiss, and Robin Tschötschel
In two simple graphs, we address a number of myths about how news media cover climate change in Germany and the United States. Some people incorrectly assume that climate change (1) has been at the center of journalistic attention for a long time and that (2) this attention has been steadily increasing (3) uniformly across countries. Also, critics sometimes wrongly claim (4) that news coverage is overly alarmist.
To provide some data on these misconceptions, we have calculated the share of articles matching certain keyword search criteria among all articles published by a range of media outlets drawn from the database Factiva[1]. The first set of keywords covers climate change broadly speaking, the second the more urgent terms like “climate crisis, and the third even more pressing language like “climate emergency.”
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