Sceptical Climate Part 2: Climate Science in Australian Newspapers

4.3 Genre of climate science articles

Journalists treat issues in different ways according to the type of narrative being produced.

In order to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of the coverage, the articles that covered climate science articles were divided into four categories – news, features, comment/opinion and editorials.

News and features are traditionally focused on reportage and information delivery but can include comment as well. Features tend to be longer with more sources. Comment pieces (also called opinion) contain factual assertions as well as analytical, emotional and ideological content. Editorials represent the ‘voice’ of the publication and carry no by-line.

In practice however, as online media production develops, journalism genres are shifting and becoming less distinct. News now tends to include more opinion and descriptive or ‘colour’ (as journalists call it) language. More space tends to be given to commentary which is cheaper to produce.

Features have traditionally been seen as longer than news articles. For that reason, they are more likely to include a range of perspectives and sources. It was clear from our sample that this assumption is no longer well founded. In order to provide a clearer picture, we divided articles into three groups: features (More than 800 words); Short features (500 - 800 words); and very short features (Less than 500 words). Many articles in the very short features group were under 200 words. A genre of very short and highly opinionated features has emerged, which are labelled as ‘features’ in the Dow Jones Factiva database. The Australian, for example, has many such articles in its ‘Cut and Paste’ section.

As indicated by Figure. 4.3.1, the genre breakdown across the ten publications remained fairly stable across the two years. There were however marked differences between publications.

Slightly less than two thirds of articles were in the reportage categories of news and features. 41% were news articles.

No publication had an average of more than two news stories about climate science a week. Only The Australian, SMH, The Courier Mail and The Age averaged more than one news article about climate science a week.

31% of climate science stories were comment pieces, highlighting the significant role being played by opinion writers in contributing to community understanding and debates about climate change. Overall there was more commentary than features. Across all publications, most of the commentary was written by non-scientists.

The Herald Sun stood out with the highest proportion of commentary (65%) and the lowest levels of news (27%). The high levels of commentary in Australia’s biggest circulation daily is partly explained by the dominant role of Andrew Bolt, a commentator and climate sceptic who also appears on radio and television. (Bolt’s role is further analysed in Section 4.6.)

The Australian had the highest proportion of features followed by the SMH and The Age. The Australian was the only publication with a higher proportion of features than comment pieces.

The Courier Mail had the highest proportions of news (66%) followed by The Adelaide Advertiser.

The SMH and The Australian had more editorials than other publications with 6 and 7 respectively.

Number of words and genre

The number of words was also used as a measure of the amount of space allocated to each genre.

From the perspective of wordcount, 44% of space was allocated to commentary compared to only 22% to news. The Herald Sun had the highest levels of space allocated to commentary with 80% of words allocated to comment pieces and only 11% allocated to news and 6% to features. The Herald Sun can be compared to The Courier Mail which carried 81% of news and features reportage with only 17% commentary. This suggests that the editorial policy in relation to climate science of the Herald Sun places a strong emphasis on attitude formation rather than information provision.

Features

There were very low numbers of features of more than 500 words in all but The Australian, the SMH and The Age that target higher income readers. These readers tend to hold higher educational qualifications than lower income readers. While more research is needed, this suggests that in regards to climate science reporting, an information divide is being produced by the Australian media. These findings confirm the findings in Sceptical Climate Part 1

The Australian had more than twice as many features as any other publication. It published a total of 57 articles, of which 22 were between 500 and 800 words and 21 were more than 800 words. The SMH followed with 27 articles of which 16 were between 500 and 800 words. Only 7 were more than 800 words. The Age published fewer features than the SMH.

Of the NewsCorp tabloids, The Daily Telegraph had the most with 17 features but only 8 of these were over 500 words. Over the three-month period in 2012, The Daily Telegraph published only two articles referring to climate science that were more than 500 words.

The Herald Sun had very few features and only two that were longer than 500 words.

The Advertiser, The West Australian, The Mercury and the NT News also had very low levels of features. These publications are the dominant source news in South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory.

News

News articles vary in length. Very short articles are more likely to quote no sources or only one source than longer articles, thus narrowing the range of perspectives and explanation offered to the reader.

Figure 4.3.4 divided the news articles into those with more than 150 words and those with less than 150 words. Of 244 news articles, 61 or 25% were less than 150 words long. The Australian, the SMH and The Age had a low proportion of news articles that were less than 150 words.

The low levels of news in the Herald Sun have been noted above. Of 13 news articles in the Herald Sun only 7 were more than 150 words. The Daily Telegraph had 15 news articles of more than 150 words which was twice as many than the Herald Sun. Only the NT News with four had less news articles of more than 150 words than the Herald Sun.

These findings highlight the low levels of news about climate science received by Australian audiences over this period.

The stance of the coverage in relation to the climate science consensus position will be further analysed in Section 4.6, Scepticism and climate change coverage.

Note:

It is possible that Fairfax media and news.com.au republished some wire news stories about climate science on their websites during this period. If so, these are not captured by this analysis. This is a low cost way of adding information and value to the publication during the ongoing crisis in the business model that supports corporate journalism. These stories rarely feature prominently on websites. While these articles to add to the overall stock of published information, reliance on wire service copy has implications for readers as wire stories are less likely than items produced in-house to contain additional material supplied by reporters that might contextualise research in local contexts. There is also less likely to be follow-up stories on further developments in the relevant research.