RISJ report suggests climate change scepticism is mainly a US / UK phenomenon

A report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) at Oxford University suggests that it is possible English speakers are getting a distorted view of the climate debate globally. In reporting on climate change issues, newspapers from the US and UK included voices sceptical about climate change much more often than those in other countries.

The report – ‘Poles Apart: the International Reporting of Climate Scepticism’ - looked at six countries: Brazil, China, France, India, the UK and US. Lead author James Painter selected two newspapers from each country, trying to find one broadly left-wing and one broadly right-wing. The report concluded that in the UK and US, "The presence of politicians espousing some variation of climate scepticism, the existence of organised interests that feed sceptical coverage, and partisan media receptive to this message, all play a particularly significant role in explaining the greater prevalence of sceptical voices in the print media."

This story was picked up by BBC News Online (10 November) and The Guardian (11 November), and also by a number of overseas media channels, such as BBC News in Brazil (8 November), Le Monde (12 November), Discovery News (14 November), BBC Mundo (Spanish) (16 November) and The Huffington Post (25 December).