Analyzing variation in state newspaper coverage of climate change

Abstract

Newspaper coverage of climate change has the potential to shape how the public and elites define this policy problem, the solutions under consideration, and the level of climate change concern. Existing US research focuses exclusively on national coverage, which limits our knowledge of how subnational media outlets report on climate change. In contrast, this study constructs an original dataset of over 12,000 climate-change-related articles that appeared in newspapers in forty-nine US states in 2012 and 2017. We combine manual coding and automated text analysis to assess whether the content of climate change coverage varies systematically across states. Consistent with existing research on journalistic norms, our analysis suggests that coverage reflects geographic differences in the ecological effects of climate change and the specific mix of industries present in a state.