Sceptical Climate Part 2: Climate Science in Australian Newspapers

4.2 Quantity of climate science coverage

The content analysis in this report aims to establish patterns in the coverage of climate science across ten Australian news publications from February to April in 2011 and 2012.

This section focuses on the quantity of coverage of climate science and breaks it down into two broad categories.

It is important to note that the quantity of coverage in a publication is not an indicator of other aspects of its nature or quality. On the other hand, if a daily media outlet publishes very little information, there can be no quality. More detailed analysis of the nature of the coverage will be provided in later sections of the report.

All articles were included in our sample that reported climate science findings or made significant reference to climate science findings. As described in the methodology section, articles with only an incidental mention of climate change were removed and this resulted in a sample of 602 articles including 332 articles published in 2011 and 270 articles in 2012. Between the two periods, there was a drop of 19% in the number of articles.

Figure 4.2.1 compares the number of articles in each chosen masthead across the two periods. It shows that there were marked differences in the quantity of coverage between the ten publications. These differences remained fairly consistent over 2011 and 2012. This means that how much climate science related material Australian readers of daily news publications receive depends on which publications they read.

All publications declined in the number of articles between the two periods with the exception of The Daily Telegraph and NT News. The latter had very little coverage in either year.

The Australian, which is Australia’s only national newspaper targeted at a general audience, had the most articles with a total of 143. Nearly a quarter of all articles with significant references to climate science (24%) were published in The Australian.

The two Fairfax papers, SMH and The Age followed with 92 and 71 articles respectively, which means that The Australian had 36% more articles than any other publication.

News Corp’s Sydney daily,The Daily Telegraph had 65 articles, more than any other News Corp daily publication.

The Courier Mail and The Advertiser, the only daily newspapers in Brisbane and Adelaide, had 53 and 50 articles respectively.

The Herald Sun, The Mercury and The West Australian had the largest proportional drops between 2011 and 2012 . The Herald Sun had the biggest drop of 49%, with 33 articles in 2011 falling to 16 articles in 2012.

Seven West Media, which owns The West Australian and dominates the media in Western Australia, had only 24 articles including only 8 in 2012. Over the two periods, The West Australian averaged less than one article every three weeks. The low rates of climate change coverage in The West Australian should also to be considered in relation to its claimed readership of 547,000 in 2011.

News Corp’s NT News, which is the only newspaper in Darwin, had only 19 articles. This equates to an average of only one article with a significant mention of climate change every five weeks. A case study of NT News is included in this report.

These results show that audiences in West Australia and the Northern Territory have been receiving very low levels of coverage of climate change.

Types of Climate Science Stories

Climate science is a multi-disciplinary field that is relevant to a wide range of research, policy, geographical and social contexts. The total sample of articles that reported climate science findings or made significant reference to climate science findings included stories about a broad range of scientific research relevant to climate change; stories which mentioned climate science in the context of broader environmental issues; political discussion about climate change policy; and stories which were either by climate sceptics or about climate scepticism.

The 602 articles were divided into two broad categories:

1. Articles in which references to climate science were focussed on scientific findings or issues surrounding scientific findings. This did not mean that the main focus of the article was necessarily about climate science. Articles about climate science scepticism or sceptics were included in this group. 392 of 602 articles (or 65%) were in this category, which is referred to in this report as ‘climate science focus’.

2. Articles which mentioned climate science findings in the context of broad discussion of government or political policy in relation to climate change. In 2011, most of these were about the carbon policy. Many stories in this category had only a minimal mention of climate science, such as a brief reference to greenhouse gas emission findings in the context of political coverage of climate change policy. 210 (35%) of these articles were in the second category, which is referred to in this report as ‘climate science in policy context’.

As this analysis shows, a significant proportion (35%) of coverage of climate science in the Australian media during this period occurred in the context of domestic political policy, particularly during 2011.

Most of the decline (35%) in the total number of articles between 2011 and 2012 was in the second category of articles that referred to climate science in the context of political policy.

As was shown in ‘Sceptical Climate Part 1: Climate Change Policy’, there was a large amount of coverage of the intense domestic debate around the introduction of a carbon emissions trading scheme in 2011. The debate and related coverage had decreased by 2012.

There was only a 9% drop in the number of articles with a climate science focus between 2011 and 2012.

Of the relevant 332 articles in 2011, 205 (62%) had a climate science focus. Of the 270 articles in 2012, 187 (69%) had a climate science focus.

Figure 4.2.2 shows a breakdown of the number of articles for each publication into those with a focus on climate science and those which referenced climate science in a policy context. This shows that The Australian had more articles (90) with a focus on climate science than any other publication, followed by SMH with 61. The lowest number of articles with a focus on climate science was in the NT News and The West Australian followed by the The Mercury and the Herald Sun. The Advertiser and The Courier Mail had the highest proportion of articles with a climate science focus.

Quantity measured as number of words

The number of words for each article was coded drawing on the information provided by the Dow Jones Factiva database.

Figure 4.2.3 compares the quantity of coverage across publications measured by number of words. The rankings are mostly similar to the count of articles.

When number of articles are counted, The Daily Telegraph has slightly less articles than The Courier Mail across the two years but had more words overall.

SMH had more coverage of climate science during this period than fellow Fairfax media publication The Age with 64,198 words across 92 articles compared to the The Age which had 44,402 words across 71 articles.

Sydney and Melbourne are the only two cities in Australia where there are two competing daily publications. When these are compared, Sydney with the SMH and The Daily Telegraph both had more coverage than Melbourne counterparts The Age and Herald Sun. Sydney had 157 articles and 95,581 words compared to Melbourne with 120 articles and 71,592 words. In other words, Sydney readers received 25% more words referencing the topic of climate science than Melbourne readers.

Figure 4.2.3 again shows the very low levels of coverage in the NT News and The West Australian when compared to all other publications.

From the point of view of the number of words, the proportion allocated to articles with a climate science focus was 60% compared to the amount measured by number of articles, which was 55%.

Conclusion

It is clear from these results that different audiences in different regions of Australia are receiving different amounts of information about climate science. While differences between the amount of coverage in publications are significant, a full explanation would require more research into overall quantities of journalism in each publication, the extent of variation over time and location due to failing business models and a comparison across different fields of reporting. Nevertheless, these results confirm other research of Australian coverage of climate change by the authors and others which has established highly differentiated spatiality of news media flows and the comparative in/visibility of information and discussion to spatially and economically defined communities in Australia. (Bacon, W., & Nash, C.J., 2012; Bacon, W., & Nash, C.J., 2013).