How partisan news outlets frame vested interests in climate change

This paper reports a theoretically-driven quantitative content analysis of news media discourse on climate change, its effects, and solutions to understand how US news discourse differs from widely supported scientific conclusions on global climate. Despite the dire warnings and calls to action, US public opinion on the causes and solutions to climate change remain divided. In the global context, the US's split views are anomalous and may be an artifact of the US media's coverage of the climate crisis. Anthropogenic climate change represents one of the most significant threats to our planet. Framed by Vested Interest Theory (VIT), we coded a representative sample of news discourse according to VIT's constituent variables. News sources were selected according to partisan orientation and balanced across the political divide. News articles were parsed into single sentences with source and ordering was randomized for presentation auto human coders. This allowed us to code at a granular level. Results show that not all five variables are equally present, with salience, response-efficacy, and certainty being most frequently referenced. While patterns also reflect a significant partisan divide, we also found unexpected non-linear patterns in the discourse, likely due to the rhetorical style of the sources' reporting. Overall, we conclude that climate change reporting does not reflect the scientific discourse, and that this likely fuels the idiosyncratic American debate on climate change, and its effects and solutions.