Science and Environmental Politics in Global Climate Change - Geography 135, Spring 2006
Media Impacts on Climate Change Awareness
For many Americans, television news shows, newspapers and magazines are a major source of information on world affairs. For the most part, the media understands what the public wants to see and read about, and because ratings drive television, and sales and circulation greatly impact newspapers and magazines, the most widely seen stories will be those which the public is interested in. However, because news sources and the media have the power to inform and shape our interests, it is very important that they run stories of importance, and focus on issues which can impact our lives, even if the public does not always seem interested at the time. Global warming and climate change is one such issue which is important but has not always received much attention.
For a number of decades now, research has gone into greenhouse gases and their effect on global warming. While this has certainly become an important issue amongst the scientific community, it is one which has not been taken up completely and regularly by the mainstream media and brought to the awareness of the public on a consistent basis. Rather, media coverage of global warming has gone through a few short periods of high activity followed by long droughts with very little focus. Because of this, the last two decades have shown changing concern about global warming as an issue by the public.
The initial poll taken in 1989 occurred after a summer in 1988 which was extremely hot and led to an increase in media coverage on the subject of global warming. 
However, this coverage did not last, and while the problems of global warming did not go away, public concern of it decreased. Similar patterns have occurred with attention to the Kyoto Protocol. In the months leading up to the Kyoto Conference, there was significant media attention about the conference and about global warming in general. However, as the conference ended and the months passed by, media coverage in the U.S. became less and less concerned with Kyoto and climate change, likely a result of the fact that Americans did not even pay close attention to the stories about the Kyoto Conference.
In the past, public disinterest in global warming was clearly a reason for limited news coverage. "Even for a potential danger, readers will become discouraged or simply bored when nothing immediate is done" or their lives are not being immediately affected. However, for an issue such as global warming, which can continue to get worse without showing immediate signs, it is potentially dangerous to go long periods of time without any media focus, allowing global warming to fall to the back of peoples minds. In that respect, Kyoto has been helpful, as progress or developments on the Kyoto Accords have brought some media attention. Even more encouraging are the recent ads by Environmental Defense and the recent issue of Time magazine: seemingly out of nowhere they have brought global warming and Kyoto back into public awareness. For global warming to remain an important issue and avoid long periods of disinterest, it is necessary for the media to force the issue into the public’s minds.