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How do mass media drive the conversation on climate change? A team of researchers is on the story

It’s not an overstatement to say that Boulder is an international hub for environmental devotees: atmospheric research experts and polar-bear habitat activists alike.

But Max Boykoff, associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, has a unique vantage point on the subject of climate change. Instead of measuring icecap melt, he measures social reactions to such events, on a global scale.

You might say he analyzes the analysts.

Boykoff’s Media and Climate Change Observatory(MeCCO) project examines global mass media coverage of climate change topics, to gauge the scope and level of public dialogue on the wellbeing of spaceship earth.

“We developed ways to look at where and when the conversation is happening,” he says of the research methodology. “We can tell what events indicate ebbs and flows in coverage, and what kinds of things facilitate the conversation or impede it.”

His idea to create MeCCO stemmed from a conversation with a colleague at Oxford University, where Boykoff is a senior visiting research associate in the university’s Environmental Change Institute.

“We were interested in climate coverage between the UK and U.S. media, but a lot of the conversation was speculative” he says. “We said we should have some kind of monitoring system for media coverage.”

The idea led him to found a graduate project for the CU-Boulder’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research (CSTPR), housed within the Cooperative Institute for Research and Environmental Sciences (CIRES).

The MeCCO team is composed of Boykoff, five graduate students, and post-doctoral researcher and visiting fellow Gesa Luedecke.

"We were interested in climate coverage between the UK and U.S. media, but a lot of the conversation was speculative. We said we should have some kind of monitoring system for media coverage.”

Each month, the team extracts publications containing the terms “climate change” or “global warming” from 50 sources in 25 countries, accessed through record databases Lexis Nexis, Proquest and Factiva. Boykoff also has counterparts at climate research institutes in Spain and Japan who compile articles from their national databases.

“I think this project is a really valuable resource,” Luedecke says. “It’s objective, and it reflects what is important to our society.”

Objective, because the researchers cull data based on a consistent set of criteria. They target publications with a large and diverse geographical range, broad circulation, and reliable access to archives over time.

Access to archives is particularly important because not all media warehouse their data, Boykoff explains. Television media archives, for instance, may store content for only a few days, and outside of the U.S., saved content is virtually nonexistent.

While TV news and Twitter seem to be the most ubiquitous messengers of death-by-carbon-emissions, MeCCO uses only newspaper sources, for their consistency and predominance.

“Newspapers are influencers,” Boykoff says. “Print media is able to dig in substantively into issues.”

But sorting through the deluge of information published on climate change is much more complex than just counting newspaper clippings.

The team has indexed four factors that determine the quantity and range of coverage: political events, scientific findings, meteorological events and social inputs.

Political events and publication of new scientific research may be the most obvious factors that cause a ruckus in the press.

The November 2014 joint announcement by the United States and China to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in the next 10 to 15 years preceded a spike in coverage that month.

MeCCO’s climate-coverage meter also experiences upticks with meteorological events such as super-storm Sandy, and social inputs, such as the attention surrounding Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

Month-to-month, the line graphs look a bit like an EKG.

“The question is: How will it develop?” Luedecke says, noting that a spike in coverage doesn’t necessarily give way to a long-term trend.

For example, climate coverage enjoyed an apex between 2006 and 2009, years bookended by the release of An Inconvenient Truth, and the failed U.N. Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark.

“No single one of these is what drives ongoing coverage,” Boykoff adds. “It’s really the connection between them that contributes to sustained coverage.”

Lauren Gifford, a PhD student in geography and member of the MeCCO team, says the research is particularly fascinating in that, over time, “the data can show us who in the world is consistently talking about climate change—and who isn’t.

“The data offer insights on which countries, regions or media outlets are incorporating climate change into regular discourses. I’m continually surprised, and disappointed, that U.S. newspapers have significantly fewer mentions of climate change or global warming than comparable papers in Western Europe.”

So is constant attention always a good thing?

What’s trending … or annoying

“Green fatigue” is a buzzword heard in recent years to describe a perceived overexposure to environmental issues in the media. Both Boykoff and Luedecke conjecture it’s why international coverage of the topic decreased 36 percent globally between 2010 and 2014.

Apparently, we’ve seen too many images of polar bears floating on melting icebergs.

“Certain media messages may or may not resonate with the public,” he says. “The focus on polar bears can garner attention, but facilitates the feeling that it is a distant issue. When it is not affecting our daily lives, it can have this reprioritization in the public view as well.”

“There are different theories about why coverage is decreasing,” Luedecke says.

Psychological research posits that humans don’t identify with future, unknown quantities.

In an April interview on BBC Radio’s program The Inquiry, Boykoff suggested another cause could be the media themselves, with diminishing newsroom staff.

“There’s reduced resources to cover complex issues such as climate change that require a certain level of investigation, a certain level of familiarity with the contours and the nuances of the topics,” he said.

We also get overwhelmed with doom-and-gloom scenarios.

“Research has shown that fear-inducing and catastrophic tones in climate-change stories can inspire feelings of paralysis through powerlessness and disbelief rather than motivation and engagement,” Boykoff wrote in his book Who Speaks for the Climate?

Despite these obstacles for the media and climate change activists, MeCCO data have registered a general upward trend in climate coverage over the past two years.

Between 2013 and 2014, climate coverage experienced a 10.5-percent gain worldwide and a marked 25 percent increase in US coverage.

“There was a lot of activity in 2014,” Boykoff says, referencing publication of the Fifth Assessment Report by the  (IPCC) as well as the People’s Climate March and U.N. Climate Change Summit in New York City. “It will be interesting to see what happens this year (2015).”

But even with momentous international summits, coverage of climate news can be inconsistent for various reasons; one being the occurrence of major events such as the crisis in Ukraine.

“Since media is following professional journalistic norms that focus on certain rules such as proximity, personalization or dramatization of events, climate change often gets overshadowed by other events that seem to be more newsworthy to the reader,” Luedecke says,

But another significant factor is what Boykoff and Luedecke call “framing.”

“A lot of conversation is about how to frame climate change—to bring it closer to people and their everyday lives,” Luedecke says. “For instance, it can also have severe consequences for human health.”

Boykoff and colleague Saffron O’Neill, senior lecturer in geography at the University of Exeter, UK, addressed the influence of framing in a recent paper examining why certain parts of IPCC Fifth Assessment Report had varying levels of coverage. Co-authors included University of Exeter researchers Hywel T.P. Williams, Tim Kurz and Bouke Wiersma.

In the article, published in the March 2015 online edition of Nature Climate Change, the authors wrote: “Frames are never neutral: They define an issue, identify causes, make moral judgments and shape proposed solutions.”

Examples of the ten frames identified in the paper include: a focus on the need for action based on solid science, natural disasters, impact on human health and economic effects.

The authors propose that a deeper understanding of framing will help climate change communicators develop more culturally accessible narratives and visuals.

“Integrating this knowledge into the design and communication of future IPCC assessments…would facilitate communication of climate change, and offer audiences a more diverse selection of frames with which to engage with the issue,” the authors concluded.

Bringing the message home

Variables such as framing illustrate the complexity of climate-change coverage. As such, Luedecke estimates the MeCCO team will be busy developing its dataset for a long time.

“Right now, we are mainly looking at the coverage of climate change,” Luedecke says of MeCCO’s data collection. “We are also thinking about looking more deeply into the data to see how climate change is framed in the coverage, which will also help to improve our understanding of how people will process the information.”

"I’m continually surprised, and disappointed, that U.S. newspapers have significantly fewer mentions of climate change or global warming than comparable papers in Western Europe.”

Reiterating Boykoff’s framing article, Luedecke suggests more comprehensive research is needed on the factors that stimulate or discourage public attention and response.

For now, Boykoff is looking to strengthen the monthly coverage assessments, including accessing data from new media platforms.

“We’ve got good momentum in a way we could really branch out” he says. “There are methods that are developing to assess social-media activity around climate change.”

There is plenty of room for expansion, as MeCCO provides monthly data to an increasing number of journalists and researchers. In addition to the BBC broadcast, CNN, The New York Times and a recent study from Yale cite MeCCO research.

“Climate change is one of the most challenging topics of the 21st century that we face, and it’s therefore crucial to look at the way media cover it and whether it motivates societal response,” Luedecke says.

Downloadable graphs of media coverage are updated monthly on the MeCCO webpage: .

Meagan M. Taylor is a CU alumna and Boulder freelance writer. She didn’t see any polar bears on her recent trip to Greenland.