Climate change apparently isn't discussed much in a lot of broadcast news production meetings.
On Monday, Media Matters released its annual findings of how often the nightly news programs and Sunday morning political shows on ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, as well as Fox News' Fox News Sunday, covered climate change in 2018. The short answer? Not a lot.
In fact, Media Matters noted a 45 percent decrease in total minutes from 2017 to 2018 — from 260 to 142. And 46 of those 142 are thanks to NBC's Meet the Press buzzer-beating Dec. 30 episode, which was devoted to the issue. Naturally, then, NBC News had the highest coverage of climate change. It was also the only network to increase its coverage from the year prior.
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ABC News, on the other hand, dropped all the way from 57 minutes of coverage in 2017, to just over 10 minutes for the entire duration of 2018. That's just 15 seconds longer than Fox News Sunday, a singular show, which also saw its climate change-dedicated minutes fall by 75 percent.
Media Matters also notes that much of the coverage occurred in the last three months of the year following the release of major climate science reports by the United Nations and the U.S. government. Read the full report at Media Matters.
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