The U.S. coverage of climate change has become dominated by partisan voices during a 30-year period, which have been divided while sending increasingly different messages to the public, according to a study posted on the website of the University of Michigan (UM) this week.

The researchers analysed climate change articles from 11 newspapers nationwide, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, between 1985 and 2017. About 62,000 climate change articles were identified by key terms such as "global warming" and "greenhouse gas."

To capture politicization, the researchers looked at how often those articles mentioned Republicans, Democrats and scientists. This allowed for a comparison over time between different environmental issues.

In the 1980s and 1990s, there were more mentions of scientists than politicians in climate change coverage, but this trend changed in the 2000s as politicians were cited more often.

The researchers also looked at how the words surrounding mentions of partisan actors in climate change articles changed over time. This revealed that the language associated with mentions of Republicans and Democrats has become more distinct over time.

This was important because it offered evidence that politicians increasingly talked about climate change in different ways.

The political divide around the issue of climate change has also led to greater coverage of the views of politicians, which likely contributed to polarising the public opinion, according to UM researchers.

(Cover image via VCG)

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