{"id":1574,"date":"2026-04-15T16:25:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T16:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/climate-coverage-plunges-though-crisis-more-dire-than-ever\/"},"modified":"2026-04-15T16:25:00","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T16:25:00","slug":"climate-coverage-plunges-though-crisis-more-dire-than-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/climate-coverage-plunges-though-crisis-more-dire-than-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"Climate Coverage Plunges, Though Crisis More Dire Than Ever"},"content":{"rendered":"

The United Nations just released <\/strong>its 2025\u00a0Global Climate Report<\/a>, and, predictably, the outlook for our Earth is incredibly dire. The past 11 years were the 11 warmest on record, and planet\u2019s energy imbalance \u2014 the amount of solar energy absorbed versus the amount Earth radiates back into space \u2014 is also the highest on record.\u00a0Greenhouse gas emissions continued to increase through 2025, despite the world crossing the\u00a01.5 degrees Celsius threshold<\/a>\u00a0marked in the Paris Agreement above which the worst effects of global heating will take place.<\/p>

There is no shortage of urgent climate news right now. The scientific consensus that we need to phase out fossil fuels fast has not changed, despite President Donald Trump<\/a>\u2019s anti-climate policies rolling back environmental protections and clean energy growth. But data shows coverage about climate change in U.S. news outlets has plunged.<\/p>

Downward trend<\/h3>

FAIR\u2019s research has found that online news coverage of climate change has been trending down. A search of the term \u201cclimate change\u201d in Media Cloud\u2019s\u00a0U.S.-National dataset<\/a>, which indexes 248 online outlets, found that there was almost 32% less climate coverage in 2025 than 2024.<\/p>

This trend is similar in TV news. A recent Media Matters study<\/a> found that climate coverage on major U.S. commercial broadcast TV networks declined 35% in 2025 from the previous year.<\/p>

Zooming out to the past five years, results show a steep downward trend. In 2021, 2.4% of U.S. online news pieces in MediaCloud contained the phrase \u201cclimate change.\u201d In 2025, that percentage was 1.3%, which is a nearly 46% decrease.<\/p>

This trend continues in 2026. Between Jan. 1 and March 31, climate stories made up 1.1% of total U.S. news coverage. That\u2019s a 42% decrease compared to the same period in 2021, when climate stories made up 1.9% of coverage.<\/p>

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Coverage of climate change in MediaCloud\u2019s U.S. news database peaked at 3.4% of content in October 2021. This was in the run-up to the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, held from Oct. 31 to Nov. 13, and was at the time the world\u2019s fourth-warmest October on record, although now it\u2019s only the\u00a0seventh-warmest<\/a>. Coverage reached its nadir in January 2026, at just under 1%, and as of March 31, 2026, sat at 1.1%.<\/p>

The unlabeled \u2018crisis\u2019<\/h3>

The term \u201cclimate crisis,\u201d which carries with it a more urgent connotation than the more familiar \u201cclimate change,\u201d has nearly disappeared from media lexicon. The term, which averaged 0.4% of coverage in 2021, reaching its peak in November 2021 at 0.7%, has averaged 0.1% of content in the first quarter of 2026.<\/p>

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Though it has never approached the usage of \u201cclimate change,\u201d there was a time when the terms \u201ccrisis\u201d or \u201cemergency\u201d to describe the heating planet were popularized in media and political lexicon, Public Citizen\u00a0reported<\/a>. In 2019, activist Greta Thunberg\u00a0declared<\/a> in a tweet:<\/p>

It\u2019s 2019. Can we all now please stop saying \u201cclimate change\u201d and instead call it what it is: climate breakdown, climate crisis, climate emergency, ecological breakdown, ecological crisis and ecological emergency?<\/p>

Months later, The\u00a0Guardian changed its style guide<\/a> to \u201cintroduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world.\u201d The editors explained:<\/p>

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Climate change is no longer considered to accurately reflect the seriousness of the overall situation; use climate emergency or climate crisis instead to describe the broader impact of climate change.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>

In 2026, this terminology is arguably more applicable now than it has ever been. The years 2015 to 2025 were the hottest on record. Yet while The\u00a0Guardian\u00a0continues its policy, it appears increasingly isolated.<\/p>

Trump and climate silence<\/h3>

Under a president who called climate change a\u00a0\u201ccon job\u201d<\/a>\u00a0at the U.N., and whose Environmental Protection Agency edited its Climate Change Science\u00a0page<\/a>\u00a0to blame global heating on debunked \u201cnatural causes\u201d theories like\u00a0changes in the Earth\u2019s orbit\u00a0<\/a>and\u00a0volcanic activity<\/a>, news media should be redoubling their efforts to tell climate change stories with accuracy.<\/p>

Instead, one cannot help but notice a correlation between Trump\u2019s second presidency and dwindling media attention to the climate. From January 2021 through November 2024, climate pieces were an average of 2.2% of total news content per month. From December 2024, after Trump was elected, through March 2026, climate pieces averaged more than 46% lower, at 1.2%.<\/p>

The lack of recent coverage is not for lack of newsworthy climate stories. In addition to the release of the 2025 U.N. report, in March alone:<\/p>