When Americans turn on the evening news to understand how the country might solve climate change, they're likely to hear about the problem but not the answer. A new study led by researchers at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder has uncovered a striking gap: two-thirds of television news coverage of climate change doesn't mention climate policy at all.
The research, published in Environmental Research Communications, examined transcripts from seven major television networks—ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NBC, and PBS—between April 2020 and April 2021, searching for segments that discussed climate change or global warming. What the team discovered matters because it shapes what ordinary Americans believe is possible. "This means that people might not hear anything about solutions when they hear about the climate crisis in the news," said Ekaterina Landgren, who led the work as lead author and former CIRES visiting fellow. "This in turn can shape what they think is normal or popular."
The silence on solutions is particularly puzzling because when television does cover climate policy, it broadly reflects actual public sentiment. Among the segments that either supported or opposed climate policy, 71 percent expressed support—a proportion that roughly matches genuine public opinion on most climate policies. Two-thirds of Americans want action on climate change, yet many vastly underestimate how much their neighbors agree with them. This perception gap has long baffled researchers, and it points to a deeper problem with how information flows through American media.
But the aggregate balance masks a far more divided reality. When researchers dug into individual networks, they found stark differences in how climate policy was covered. CNN presented mostly supportive or neutral views of climate policy, while Fox covered mostly opposing views. Because most Americans watch only one or two outlets rather than the full media landscape, many viewers experience coverage that is far more skewed than the overall numbers suggest. "Aggregate balance masks real polarization," explained Jeremiah Osborne-Gowey, co-author of the paper and now a research associate at the Institute of Behavioral Science and associate research scientist at Arizona State University. "Even if the overall system is balanced, lots of Americans do not experience it that way because they follow or 'tune in' to particular outlets."
The finding matters not because television alone explains the gap between public support and public perception—it doesn't. The information environment is vast and complex. People encounter climate information through social media, conversations, and countless other channels, each shaping what they ultimately retain and believe. Yet television remains a powerful influence on how millions of Americans understand the world, and the absence of policy solutions in two-thirds of coverage represents a missed opportunity to help viewers see a path forward.
Landgren, now a Dean's Sustainability Leaders Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, is clear about what comes next. "TV news is only one aspect of the information environment," she said. "We need to understand not just what the news covers, but also what news people are exposed to, how they share it on social media, and what they retain from it after they watch or read it." The work suggests that solving the perception problem requires looking far beyond any single outlet—and understanding how information moves through an entire ecosystem of media.