Global Warming Is Gathering Momentum, But Global Media Coverage Of Warming Fell 38% In 2025

[hatrack]

Scientists are pretty sure that Earth is hotter than at any time in the last 125,000 years, but the news media is moving on, trying to keep on top of a fire hose of pressing news — from the daily chaos of the Trump administration to the breaking developments in the war on Iran. The shift in attention started during the COVID-19 pandemic and, despite a temporary rebound, has gathered pace in recent years: Since its peak in 2021, global news coverage of climate change has dropped 38 percent, according to data from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Media and Climate Change Observatory.

Many journalists have been busy digging through 3 million pages of the Epstein files rather than the latest scientific report, though you can still find news about some of the biggest recent findings, including that estimates of sea level rise have been dramatically underestimated and that global warming has accelerated “significantly” over the past decade.

Last year, the first of Trump’s second term, major broadcast networks in the U.S. cut their climate coverage 35 percent compared to the year before, according to a recent report by Media Matters, a watchdog organization. “The competition, the ‘flood the zone’ strategy from the administration, is making it very difficult for anything that’s not super urgent in this moment,” said Allison Fisher, director of the climate and energy program at the nonprofit.

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After Trump took office with a promise to “drill, baby, drill,” a widespread “climate hushing” fell across the country. Businesses suddenly stopped talking about the climate pledges they’d been trumpeting a few years earlier. Many congressional Democrats avoided talking about climate change directly, with the phrase vanishing from their speeches, social media accounts, and podcast appearances. Then the Trump administration went after news outlets, pulling public broadcasting funding from NPR and PBS stations and threatening to revoke the broadcast licenses of major networks over coverage Trump didn’t like. “You have corporate media owners who are increasingly fearful of running afoul of the Trump administration that characterizes climate change as a ‘hoax’ and climate action as a ‘scam,’ right?” Fisher said.

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https://grist.org/language/global-heating-climate-news-drought-chaos/

[jfz9580m]

1. This has been angering me a lot

Across the board there is this tacit agreement to lump any concern for the planet no matter how vitally connected to human life as somehow this frivolous, inconsequential fluff.

As all kinds of actual fluff explodes. Idiocracy on steroids.