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Just. Welcome to Feature of Journalism, a podcast from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

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I'm Federica Kabini, the head of Leadership Development at the Institute.

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This is a special series of our podcasts, and it's dedicated to our digital news report.

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2022. Over seven episodes, we, we're diving into the most comprehensive piece of research on news consumption around the world.

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In this episode of the series, we're joined by Dr. Craig Robertson,

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postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute and part of the digital news report team for the report.

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Craig As looking at how audiences engage with news around climate change, undoubtedly one of the most defining issue of our time.

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We'll look at how interest varies across the world.

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What sources of information people prefer and attitudes towards news organisations taking a more active role in the climate coverage.

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Craig, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me.

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Firstly, what do you think makes climate change a tricky issue for NEWSROOM to cover?

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Is there is always seem to be a more immediate story that takes priority.

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I think there's a there's a few things that make it tricky. And this is just from my point of view as a researcher.

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But one issue is just how large and complicated the story is, so it can be difficult to tackle head on.

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We're talking about a process that is playing out over time, that's affecting many different things and which can actually be very hard to explain.

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So and also the causes are multifaceted for climate change and the effects are multifaceted.

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So it's hard to put all that into a short news piece.

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And in the process of explaining greenhouse gas emissions, their effect on climate to the implications for global ecosystems is a pretty large task.

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And I think another reason is difficult to cover. And this links to what you said is that the story plays out gradually over time.

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And this can mean that climate change doesn't quite fit in with so-called news values.

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So these are the kind of unwritten rules of journalism, the features of stories which make them interesting or worth covering.

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So news values might include things like immediacy or novelty or timeliness.

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You cover a house fire because it's immediate and they're in front of you or a protest

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because it's a sort of visible demonstration of people's anger and frustration.

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But climate change doesn't always have that kind of immediate face. Temperatures rise gradually.

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Ecosystems are impacted gradually. So the effects take time, and there aren't always those visible and obvious and immediate things to focus on.

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That's unless there's a big fire or floods related to climate change, then there's something that you can point a camera at.

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But at the point that there's a big forest fire flood, that's actually a bad thing.

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It's too late because at that point, things have already gotten pretty bad.

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You need to cover the causes and the trends and the underlying science,

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but that stuff in some ways can always be pushed aside until the next week or the next month,

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because there's another story like a political scandal or a court case that takes a more immediate focus.

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But arguably, climate change always needs that focus on it because it's such a big story and it won't go away.

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But all this relates to sort of the third element I'll mention and why it's tricky to cover climate change.

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And that's the audiences you do need to cover all of the causes, the trends, the underlying science.

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But it can be difficult to get audiences interested in that.

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Things that they can't necessarily see and things that are very complicated, that which play out over time.

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And things that are also, quite frankly, depressing and scary and difficult to understand.

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So one click through line for digital news report this year is that people are tuning out to the news

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more and more because of the stories that are playing out are depressing or difficult to understand.

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So for newsrooms, it's tricky to get audiences interested in this topic because it is so big.

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It's it's depressing, it's scary. Yeah.

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So that's sort of one thing that that's absolutely the perfect sort of segue way to the next question.

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So let's, let's talk about the audiences. The digital news report gauges audiences behaviour in 46 markets around the world.

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What variation do we see in interest in climate change between these countries?

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So we see some pretty large variations. And it's it's kind of interesting to see how they are grouped by different regions.

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So if you look at interest in climate change news, it's highest in several markets in Latin America, Southern Europe and Asia.

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So, for instance, in our survey, the highest levels of interest we find are in Greece and Portugal.

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So countries in southern Europe as well as in Chile and the Philippines and these markets,

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around half of the people say they are interested in climate change news.

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But then we can contrast these with the stark differences we see in northern and western European countries and places like Norway or France.

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We find pretty low levels of interest. So only a third of people in these countries say they are interested in climate change news.

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And then we have the country with the lowest level of interest, which is the United States,

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where only 30% of people say they're interested in climate change news.

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And we'll get to the reasons behind that in a moment. Yeah.

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What could explain these variations? So when I looked at the data, one of the difficult things I had to figure out was why it looked the way it did.

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So as researchers, we're always looking for patterns in the data and for explanations.

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So when I looked at the large variations in interest in climate change news and the groupings of countries,

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I had to sit back and think why it looked the way it did.

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Why were Greece and Portugal and Chile amongst those with the highest interest?

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And why were Norway, France and the US grouped together down the bottom?

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And I'll concede that there they're not perfect explanations.

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There are some very nuanced and complicated reasons for different levels of interest in different countries.

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So it might be how climate change is covered or whether it's covered at all to how much of a

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political or social issue it is if it is a social or political issue in that country at all.

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So, you know, for instance, if climate change is uncovered very much, people might express a bit more interest in the topic.

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Whereas if they feel like it's cover too much, people might express less interest in the topic.

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Or if climate change isn't a very polarised or political issue.

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People might be open to hearing about the topic. Whereas if it's a public, political or very polarised topic, people might tune out to it.

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Like in the United States. So these are the possibilities, and we can't necessarily point to one reason or another in certain countries,

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or based on this data and this research, there'll be different reasons in each country.

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But one factor I did come to and which sort of cuts across all the markets is how much each country is being affected by climate change.

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So in these countries where we see higher levels of interest, we see that these countries have been impacted in recent years by pretty bad things.

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There's been wildfires in Greece and Portugal and there's drought in Chile.

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These aren't the only countries to experience bad things.

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The US has had pretty frequent and bad forest fires in recent years and their interest in climate change seems to be low.

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But my working theory is that people will express more interest and pay more attention when bad things happen.

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So we're pretty visual species. We respond to stimuli, we respond to our surroundings.

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So when we can see in our own countries, in our own backyards,

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that bad things are happening like fires or floods or droughts, and we can link them in our minds to climate change,

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then I think people express more interest and more openness to the topic because they see that climate change is real in their in their backyards.

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You mention the link with climate change being a polarised or a political issue,

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and one of the things you look in your chapter is how political orientation correlates with individual interest in climate change news.

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What did you find? Yeah.

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So this is one of the key points which actually accounts for some of the differences we see in places like the US and Australia.

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So these countries have lower levels of overall interest in climate change news,

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but they're also countries, as I say, which had experienced some pretty bad things in recent years.

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So each year we expect to see large bad forest fires in the US and Australia.

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But these countries don't fit in the pattern of my theory of people being more interested in countries where bad things happen.

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And when I looked at the data, what I found was the explanation was politics, polarisation.

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So in both the US and Australia, climate change is arguably quite a political and polarising topic.

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And if we break down people's interest in climate change news by their political views, we can kind of see what's going on in both countries.

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There is extremely low interest in the topic amongst people on the right.

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So conservatives in the US, for example, are almost completely uninterested in the topic.

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And then people on the left are as about interested in the topic as people elsewhere in other countries.

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But it seems to be that the very low interest amongst people on the right, the Conservatives,

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which is driving down the overall level of interest across the country, so their low level of interest drags down the overall average.

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And if we look at political discourse in the US around climate change, for instance, we can kind of see why this might be happening.

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And you see this in all the countries you look at.

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Now, the interesting thing is it's not the case everywhere.

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So there are some countries where there's no major left rights, political differences at all.

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And this may be because climate change isn't such a political or polarising issue in these countries yet.

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Or maybe the climate change isn't discussed as a major issue at all, so it hasn't had the chance to become polarised.

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But now we don't always see the same kind of left right polarisation in other countries like we do in the US or Australia.

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If we look at the sources of information the people pay much attention to when it comes to climate change news.

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What are these sources and what do you think is the reason why people look at these specific sources?

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Yeah. So beyond people's interest in the topic, we also looked at where people said they got their information or news about climate change.

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We gave people a number of options to choose from.

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So we got major news organisations, politicians, regular people, influencers and celebrities, documentaries and a few other options.

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So we gave this list to people and asked them where they got their climate change news from, if they got climate change news at all.

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And interestingly, a source which came out on top across markets and age groups was documentaries, TV and film documentaries.

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And this was above major news organisations and also smaller or alternative news organisations.

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Another reason why I think documentaries were above news organisations.

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I think this comes back to us being a visual species again. So these documentaries aren't necessarily always about climate change.

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Maybe they have an environmental message, or because they're about animals or the environment.

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People take them to be like implicitly about climate change,

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but they have climate change associations and I think people remember them or pay

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attention to them because they have good stories and they have good visuals.

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So you follow an emotional narrative and you see the animals environments and the

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documentaries are memorable and engaging and impactful so people learn from them,

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and next week they are also sometimes emotionally impacted by them.

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So they resonate with people and people remember them.

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David Attenborough is also a very popular person and people think about him when they think about climate change or environmental issues.

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So the end of the day,

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I think that people are more just more likely to remember and be impacted by an episode of Blue Planet or a documentary or something like that,

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than they are to remember a news article that they read in the newspaper or saw online.

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So those highly produced documentaries are memorable and they have resonance.

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A couple of other interesting things.

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I'll also note we can see in our data just the sheer number of people, particularly on the political right, who said,

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I don't pay attention to any sources for climate change news, so they don't pay attention to the topic at all.

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And again, this is particularly the case in the US and Australia, but not the case in places like Chile or Portugal.

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And then we see the much higher levels of engagement with celebrities and influencers amongst younger people.

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They're not the most popular source for information amongst younger people.

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That's still documentaries and major news organisations.

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But younger people are sometimes two or three times more likely to get climate change news from celebrities, influencers and activists online.

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Climate change is one of those issues where the scientific consensus is so

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overwhelming that some people feel journalism shouldn't engage in both sides.

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What does our research say about people's attitude to impartiality around climate change news?

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Yeah. So we also in our survey asked people in all our markets how they think journalists should cover climate change as a topic.

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So this could be to take a clear position in favour of climate change action.

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So taking a position saying we should do something or this could be a position saying we should do nothing or be against climate change action,

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or this could be a position to reflect a range of views and let the public decide what to think.

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So we put this to our respondents and we did find some pretty big differences across countries.

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So in places like Chile or Portugal, we have like we've mentioned so far, people tend to be in favour of journalists taking a positive stance.

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So they are more in favour of more okay with journalists not being impartial to advocate for changes or solutions.

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And this may be because political divides around climate change are so stark in these countries as they are in the US or Australia,

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or because the negative effects of climate change are being felt.

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So people see the importance of taking action or taking a stance and that translates into them maybe being in favour of journalists taking a stance.

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But on the other hand, in places like the US, Norway and Germany, we see people favouring impartiality.

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So more people, particularly those on the right, want both sides covered.

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They want to be able to make up their own minds about climate change after being given a range of views on the topic.

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So part of this difference comes from the very strong views of people on the right.

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Again, they are driving down some of the overall country averages and sort of levelling things out.

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It's a political and politicised and polarising issue.

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So people want both sides told in these countries.

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And I think part of the difference might also be the expectations around impartiality, especially in places like Germany or Norway,

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where they have expectations of impartiality from public broadcasters talking about these kinds of topics.

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Interestingly, the political divide is sort of the same we found last year in the 2021 digital news report where people

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on the right in particular wanted both sides of the story told while people on the left were mark,

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with journalists taking one point of view, taking a stand on an issue.

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And then last year, we also saw how views on impartiality split by age.

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And we find the same thing here again. So younger people are more in favour of journalists taking a stand on climate change,

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advocating for positive action, whereas older people are more in favour of the both sides or impartial reporting.

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Keeping this in mind,

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do you think there are any pitfalls in newsrooms taking a more active role campaigning stance when it comes to coverage from news?

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I think there are benefits and pitfalls with any potential stances taken.

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So on the one hand, taking a stance down the middle doing that,

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both sides impartial partial reporting might risk people thinking that you're out of touch with scientific reality.

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So there is a scientific consensus and coming across like you're questioning that or playing it down the middle might not sit well with some people.

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On the other hand, taking a clear stance in favour of action risks alienating those people in the public who aren't quite on board with that.

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So it risks putting off those older or more conservative audiences who want impartiality or not advocacy.

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But this is the line I think newsrooms have to walk,

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and maybe sometimes someone will say this issue is important enough that they have to take a stance and

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maybe some of those in the audience will be brought along and be convinced while others might be put off.

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But what I do think is important, though, at the end of the day,

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is for newsrooms to really think about who they want to reach and how they want to reach them.

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So older people and those on the political right are very important and very politically active parts of the population.

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Their participation is arguably needed if there's to be action on climate change.

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So it's a question of how to bring in that audience, not drive them away,

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and also how to serve those audiences who want newsrooms to take a more active stance.

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It's a difficult task, especially when the issue becomes political and polarised, but it's sort of the line you have to walk.

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On this thing of becoming the issue becoming politicised.

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Could this be a more of a problem in places where the issue is more polarised?

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Polarised? Yeah, as I say, it's more difficult when the issue is politicised and more polarised.

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It's hard, but audiences are polarised on the issue.

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So in the US you've got a large contingent of people who are completely dismissive of climate change or the issues or concerns around it.

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So it's maybe not top of the agenda for them, and that's also kind of viewed as a left leaning issue.

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So journalists taking a clear stance will ramp up against that.

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But I think if the evidence is clear and the facts around climate change point of one direction, you just sometimes you kind of have to report that.

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And then maybe those audiences will eventually come around or come along with you.

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But again, as I say,

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I think you have to consider audiences specifically and then make sure that you're thinking about how to reach them and engage them,

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even if they are tuned out to the story or they think it's a left leaning issue or whatever they think it is.

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You have to think very clearly and deliberately how to reach them in engagement, and I think there are strategies to do that.

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You've mentioned documentaries before and we've seen the success of television documentaries you mentioned or even the Netflix movie Don't Look Up,

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which is essentially an allegory or a satire about climate change and the world.

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And we've seen how these demonstrate that you can tell stories about the issues in engaging ways that appeal to a mass audience.

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Do you think there's anything newsrooms can learn from the report and these examples on how to enhance the storytelling around climate change?

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Yeah. John, the cap is an interesting example. So it's not a documentary, obviously.

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It's a movie which is told a story about climate change around politics, around the issue in an engaging way.

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So to use comedy and satire.

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And I think those elements are kind of disarming and helps tell the story of how climate change is politicised and had resonance with people.

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I think because it connected with something. Many people feel that we seem to be ignoring such a big, big issue, but what can we learn from it?

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And I guess from the documentaries as well, I think it's about narratives and it's about emotions.

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So facts and figures are very important. So they are key to the story.

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But there are only so many facts and figures that people can take.

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At the end of the day, sometimes we'll do tune out at some point and that's even me.

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And I'm a numbers person. I do tune out at some point when there's too many facts and too many figures.

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So what I think sometimes is good to hook people and what draws the men as and what makes things memorable impactful are stories.

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So people need narratives. So maybe there's something to learn from documentaries or even from Don't look

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at the movie that people need clear stories and narratives to grasp on to,

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and then they need something that's more emotionally engaging and seems less dry.

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So that's not to say that all news reports should be dramatic narratives and emotional tales.

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You do need the fundamentals of the reporting. You need the hard science, you need the data, you need the facts.

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But I do think there's some more room there for engaging storytelling.

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Craig, thank you so much for joining on the podcast and helping understand such a complex issue.

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Thanks for having me. Our guest today was Dr. Craig Robertson, postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute.

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Thank you all for listening to this episode of Digital News Report 2022 Podcast Series.

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You can catch up on the other episodes on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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And if you want to read the report in full, you can find it online.

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A Digital News Report about August 20, 22.

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And if you don't want to miss any news from the Institute,

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you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter by clicking the link on our Twitter bio or on our homepage.

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This was the future of Journalism. A podcast by the Rocket Institute.

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I'm forgetting a Cherubini and Rebeck's soon.