‘Ye Olde Hot Aire’: reporting on human contributions to climate change in the UK tabloid press

By M. Boykoff, M. Mansfield. 2008

159 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This letter explores daily print media coverage of climate change in four United Kingdom (UK) tabloid newspapers: The Sun (and News of the World), Daily Mail (and Mail on Sunday), the Daily Express (and Sunday Express), and the Mirror (and Sunday Mirror). Through examinations of content in articles over the last seven years (2000–2006), triangulated with semi-structured interviews of journalists and editors, the study finds that UK tabloid coverage significantly diverged from the scientific consensus that humans contribute to climate change. Moreover, there was no consistent increase in the percentage of accurate coverage throughout the period of analysis and across all tabloid newspapers, and these findings are not consistent with recent trends documented in United States and UK ‘prestige press’ or broadsheet newspaper reporting. Findings from interviews indicate that inaccurate reporting may be linked to the lack of specialist journalists in the tabloid press. This study therefore contributes to wider discussions of socio-economic inequality, media and the environment. Looking to newspapers that are consumed by typically working class readership, this article contributes to ongoing investigations related to what media representations mean for ongoing science–policy interactions as well as potentialities for public engagement.

Subfields: Communication, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/94af81fcf98968ed598d623044bed8ed872f7005

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Citations in the corpus

Media attention for climate change around the world: A comparative analysis of newspaper coverage in 27 countries (2013, background): “…in 1990, 1992, 1995, 1997, 2001, 2005 and 2006; coincide with national and international political events; similar distribution in both newspapers Boykoff and Mansfield, 2008 UK 2000-2008 Media: The Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Express, and Mirror Search keywords: “climate change” or “global warming”…”
Neutralizing misinformation through inoculation: Exposing misleading argumentation techniques reduces their influence (2017, background): “Media coverage of scientific issues has diverged from the scientific consensus on issues such as climate change [34,35,36] and the mythical vaccine-autism link [37].”
Climate change and media usage: Effects on problem awareness and behavioural intentions (2011, background): “Both the findings of Brossard et al. (2004), who analysed newspapers between 1987 and 1997, and of Boykoff and Mansfield (2008), who analysed television news from 1995 to 2004, indicate that the American media gave attention to both sides over the whole period of investigation.”