EXTRA! EXTRA! Read all about climate change skepticism in the US and UK press.
Newspapers in the United States and United Kingdom give climate change deniers more attention than the press in Brazil, France, India and China.
Over 80 percent of the sources, opinions and editorials skeptical of climate change were found in the US or UK press by an Oxford University study.
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Politics seem to play more of a role in newspaper coverage than science. Study results show conservative newspapers in the US and UK carried significantly more skeptical voices than left-leaning papers.
"There are politicians in the UK and the US who espouse some variation of climate skepticism. Both countries also have organizations for ‘climate change skeptics’ that provide a skeptical voice for the media, particularly in those media outlets that are more receptive to this message. This is why we see more skeptical coverage in the Anglo-Saxon countries than we do in the other countries in the study where one or more of those factors appear to be absent," said lead researcher James Painter, of Oxford's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
The researchers used at least two papers representing different ends of the political spectrum from the countries they studied, but didn't find the same political bias in climate change coverage in any but the US and UK.
More than 3,000 articles were examined from 10 British national newspapers as well as papers from Brazil (Folha de São Paulo and Estado de São Paulo), China (People’s Daily and Beijing Evening News), France (Le Monde and Le Figaro), India (Times of India and The Hindu), and the United States (New York Times and Wall Street Journal).
The study covered February to April 2007 and mid-November 2009 to mid-February 2010. These dates were selected to include the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen and the so-called ‘Climategate.’
IMAGE:
Different newspapers of the world in a shop in Heathrow Airport (Ivan Martinez; Wikimedia Commons)
Tags: Climate Change, Global Warming
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