In 2007 News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch claimed that Fox News coverage of climate change would “improve”. However, a recently released study by the Union of Concern Scientists (UCS) shows that Fox and The Wall Street Journal, also owned by News Corporation, have consistently skewed coverage of climate change in favor of the fossil fuel burning status quo.
Not only has the coverage of climate change not improved in News Corporation owned news media outlets in the U.S. but it also has been predominantly negative.
Additionally, according to the UCS, a 2012 snapshot analysis shows that recent coverage of climate science in media outlets has been overwhelmingly misleading.
93 percent of Fox coverage misleading
In 2011, 93 percent of Fox News representations of climate science were misleading, according to the UCS. Furthermore, 81 percent of the Wall Street Journal’s letters, op-eds, columns, and editorials were misleading on climate science, according to the UCS.
The UCS analysis focused primarily on representations of climate science. It found that both Fox News and The Wall Street Journal placed heavy emphasis on negative coverage of climate action aimed at reducing global warming emissions, including personal lifestyle decisions as well as government policies.
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The UCS report notes Fox News and WSJ coverage have contributed to public distrust of scientists and scientific institutions in the U.S. Fox News is a highly influential American media outlet. Last year, it was the most popular national news network in the U.S.
The UCS also found that Fox and WSJ coverage of climate science tended to offer a wide-ranging dismissal of human-caused climate change and, more broadly, to reject climate science as a body of knowledge.
An example of what the UCS characterized as misleading coverage comes from a report published in The Wall Street Journal that notes, “We are in the middle of what you might call a global warming bubble. It is a failure of global warming theory itself and of the credibility of its advocates [to acknowledge this].”
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