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Abstract
Climate skepticism in the UK media has not been a major focus of recent research. This paper aims to help fill the gap by looking at the incidence of skeptical voices in UK newspapers across three periods: 2007, 2009/2010, and 2010/2011. After analyzing more than 3200 articles, it finds that skeptical voices increased their presence markedly across all newspapers and all types of articles in the second period, and maintained a significant presence in many in the third. Uncontested skeptical voices were particularly prevalent in opinion pieces and editorials in right-leaning newspapers in the second. It also finds that skeptical voices or opinions were more likely to be included in pieces written by in-house non-specialist columnists than by environment editors or correspondents. The negative implications of the results for public understanding and the quality of public debate are then explored.
Notes
1. Starting in November 2009, UAE scientists were accused of manipulating data and abusing the peer review process.
2. Here ideology was defined as “a system of values, norms and political preferences, linked to a program of action vis-à-vis a particular social order” (Carvalho, Citation2005, p. 225).
3. World Newspaper Coverage of Climate Change or Global Warming, 2004–2013: http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/media_coverage/uk/graph.jpg
4. BBC4’s Meet the Skeptics, and BBC2’s Science under Attack programs, and the Royal Court’s play The Heretic.
5. Reference hereafter alludes to daily and weekend editions, unless otherwise stated.
6. Acknowledging, like Dirikx and Gelders (Citation2010), that these “leanings” are not definitive ideological categories, they are however useful groupings saying something significant about their politics (Oates, Citation2008).
7. The News of the World was not included, but the weekend edition of the FT was.
8. All circulation figures are taken from ABC reproduced on the Guardian media website: http://www.theguardian.com/media/abcs
9. See Painter (Citation2011) for further discussion.
10. See Hickman (2013) for further discussion.
11. Articles only included that appeared in the print version of the newspapers, and not their websites.
12. “Crunch Time”, the Mirror, 7 December 2009.
13. See for example, “Why is Britain’s weather warmist?”, Sunday Telegraph, 3 January 2010 or “The fate of the world hangs on a single Siberian tree”, Sunday Telegraph, 6 December 2009.
14. In December 2010, the Mail had a daily circulation of 2.03m compared to 624,000 for the Express. The Guardian had 265,000 and the Independent 175,000.
15. The exception was a news article in the Telegraph (18 February 2011) about the skeptic television presenter Johnny Ball.
16. The conservative radio presenter Nick Ferrari authored two. Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, Neil Hamilton, conservative blogger James Delingpole, Leo McKinstry, William Hickey, and Ann Widdecombe all wrote one each.
17. In December 2010, the Telegraph had a daily circulation of 631,000 and the Sun 2.72 million.
18. Lawson, Michaels, Lindzen, Christy, Friis-Christensen, and Singer.