What Climate Change?

You never hear anything about it on the news, so it must not be real.

Media Matters for America has published its annual review of American evening newscast climate coverage for 2016, and the results are stunning:

In 2016, evening newscasts and Sunday shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC, as well as Fox Broadcast Co.’s Fox News Sunday, collectively decreased their total coverage of climate change by 66 percent compared to 2015

In all of 2016, these news programs spent a combined grand total of 50 minutes talking about climate change. More than half of that come from CBS Evening News, which nevertheless only spent half as much time talking about climate change in 2016 as it had in 2015.

It’s certainly not as though 2016 lacked newsworthy climate stories. We learned in January that 2015 had smashed the record for hottest year, previously set just a year earlier. And 2016 just kept getting hotter, with nearly every month setting a new heat record. In September, the US and China agreed to formally ratify the Paris climate agreement. The list goes on and on, with newspapers like The Guardian constantly publishing important climate-related news throughout the year.

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Unfortunately, climate change was rarely raised in the primary debates, and never in the general election debates.

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Only after the election did news networks finally examine what a President Trump would mean for the Earth’s climate.

  Guardian

And it's not good. It's good for corporations who don't want environmental regulations in their way, though.

With so little news coverage on the subject, it’s also unsurprising how confused Americans are about climate change – just 49% of Americans realize that most scientists think global warming is happening, and only 53% understand that humans are causing the problem.

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PBS was the oasis in this desert of climate news coverage. PBS NewsHour was the only show that examined what impact a Trump or a Clinton presidency would have on climate-related issues and policies before the election.

Of course, the proposed Trump budget cuts funding for PBS.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.