BIO

Hello! I am Aryan Manohar, a freshman student at FSU studying political science. This is my first year as a Presidential Scholar, and my first year in UROP. Other than that, I am a pretty private guy!

Covering the Climate: How the American News Media Reports On The Environment

Abstract

In American news media, language can change the depiction of environmental events, especially dealing with climate change. By analyzing the various differences in the language and attitudes of American news media coverage of the environment, we can decipher how different media outlets cover environmental topics. This research project thus aims to bring more clarity about the news media’s coverage of climate change and environmental issues. We focused on two aspects of their coverage: the degree to which these media outlets covered climate change and environmental issues, and the way in which they were covered. This research project first focuses on coding a collection of articles and interviews from major cable news outlets in America over the past 30 years (between 1990 and 2020) based on the content and tonality of their coverage of environmental issues. This was to investigate how each media outlet differed on its reporting of climate change and environmental issues, or if they differed at all. We examined variables such as the composition of environmental topics and how supportive they were of of the environmental topics they covered. This study aims to clarify the coverage of news outlets on environmental topics, as well as understanding how news sources communicate these issues to their consumers.

Keywords: UROP, Climate change, Environment