The Public Understanding of Science journal recently published a study analyzing media partisanship and perceptions of global warming. The researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,000 Americans about their media consumption habits and their views on climate change.
The results, in which some may deem to be unsurprising, indicated that consuming conservative media (e.g. Fox News, conservative radio) decreases trust in scientists, therefore decreasing the belief among those consumers that global warming exists. On the other hand, the survey results indicated that consumption of non-conservative media (per the study, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, NPR, The New York Times and The Washington Post) increased trust in scientists, therefore leading to more support to the belief that climate change is occurring.
The study concluded that conservative media creates distrust of scientists by:
- Presenting mainstream scientists as biased, while presenting those supportive of conservative beliefs as objective.
- Disparaging scientific institutions and peer reviewed journals.
- Claiming that peer reviewed research is politically liberal.
- Alleging that climate scientists manipulated data to obtain funding for research.
- Portraying climate science as a religion.
As The Guardian’s blog post on the study notes, the survey results are consistent with a previous study conducted by John Cook at the University of Queensland.
However, it seems that not all those who consume conservative media buy the global warming deniers’ claims. As indicated in The Guardian’s post, a study by The Yale Project on Climate Change Communication showed that 51% of Republican voters support a revenue-neutral carbon tax, while a poll by the League of Conservation Voters showed that 53% of young (under-35) Republican voters considered climate change deniers to be “ignorant, out of touch or crazy.”
Photo via paul nine-o’s flickr.
