Fox vs. CNN: What Your TV News Channel Shows You About Climate Policy

Most Americans have no idea how many of their fellow citizens actually support climate action, and a new study suggests television news may help explain part of that gap, especially for viewers of some networks.

Research published in the journal Environmental Research Communications found that while U.S. television news, taken as a whole, presents a roughly fair picture of public opinion on climate policy, that big-picture balance conceals something far more telling underneath. Individual networks are deeply polarized. Fox News skews heavily against climate policy. CNN, MSNBC, CBS, and PBS skew heavily in favor of it. Depending on where a person gets their news, they may be living in an entirely different information reality.

Researchers analyzed more than 2,000 news transcripts from seven major networks, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, NBC, and PBS, collected between April 2020 and April 2021, to understand whether coverage fairly reflected how the American public actually feels about climate policies.

Two-Thirds of Climate News Coverage Never Mentions Climate Policy

Perhaps the most revealing finding in the study has nothing to do with bias. It’s about absence. Roughly two-thirds of all climate change news segments examined made no mention of climate policy whatsoever. Importantly, the vast majority of those transcripts never addressed how popular these policies actually are. Researchers determined that by comparing the tone of coverage against real public polling, not by tracking whether TV anchors mentioned survey numbers.

This matters because surveys consistently show that many climate policies enjoy broad public support, in some cases from two-thirds or more of Americans. Yet research has found that most Americans dramatically underestimate how popular those policies are, sometimes by 20 percentage points or more. If television news rarely discusses policy at all, that gap in public awareness starts to make more sense.

When specific policies were discussed, the study’s time frame, spanning the 2020 presidential election and the early months of the Biden administration, helps explain why coverage of executive actions dominated. Renewable energy and greenhouse gas reduction tended to receive favorable coverage. The Green New Deal drew the most negative treatment of any policy category, with opposition outpacing support in transcripts that mentioned it.

Fox News vs. CNN: A Climate Policy Divide on Television News

When researchers looked at individual networks, the divide was quite clear. Among transcripts that expressed either support or opposition to climate policy, more than 95% of segments on CNN, CBS, and PBS expressed support. On Fox News, only about 6% expressed support, making it the only network in the study where opposition outweighed support.

NBC and ABC landed in the middle, with roughly 75% to 80% of their policy-related segments expressing support for climate action.

Fox News and CNN also stood out as the two networks that mentioned climate policy most frequently. CNN accounted for 44.3% of all policy-related transcripts in the study, and Fox News contributed 25.8%. Those two networks, despite sitting at opposite ends of the spectrum, are driving much of the climate policy conversation on television, just in completely opposite directions.

Coverage of the Green New Deal illustrated this clearly. Fox News accounted for more than half of all Green New Deal mentions in the dataset, and those mentions were predominantly negative. CNN led on most other policy categories.

Climate Policy News and the Problem of Selective Viewing

Because most people don’t watch every channel equally, the researchers took an additional step. They matched their transcript analysis with self-reported media-diet data from 5,375 survey respondents, allowing them to estimate the kind of climate policy coverage each person was likely exposed to based on their own reported viewing habits.

On average, people’s media diets leaned toward coverage that was supportive of climate policy. But that average masked a wide split. Viewers who rarely or never watched Fox News were consuming coverage that was overwhelmingly favorable, sometimes approaching 100% supportive. Viewers who frequently watched Fox News were consuming coverage that was predominantly critical. Not every American is watching the same news, and it shows.

Why Americans Still Underestimate Climate Policy Support

Most Americans believe climate policies are far less popular than they actually are. Researchers went looking for whether biased TV coverage could explain that gap, and the answer turned out to be more complicated than expected.

On the whole, they did not find evidence that television news, in aggregate, underrepresents public support for climate policy. So broad media bias alone does not appear to be the primary reason Americans underestimate how many of their fellow citizens support climate action. Outlet-level polarization may still be a factor, as Fox News viewers show higher rates of misperception, consistent with that network’s heavily oppositional coverage. The researchers also point to another possible explanation, noting that people tend to assume Americans are more politically divided than they actually are on many issues, which leads them to underestimate the real level of support for popular policies.

What a person watches increasingly determines what version of climate reality they receive. Add up all the networks and the system may look roughly balanced, but the experience for individual Americans can look very different depending on which channel is on.

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Disclaimer: This article is based on an observational study examining television news transcripts from a specific one-year period. The findings reflect associations between network-level coverage patterns and self-reported viewing habits, and do not establish that any network directly causes viewers to hold particular beliefs about climate policy. Readers are encouraged to consult the original research for full methodology and context.

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