ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the news media as communicators of ideas and information, policies and programmes, claims and counter-claims about climate change which originate elsewhere. In his survey of longitudinal studies of news coverage of the environment, Anders Hansen notes 'two important characteristics': that once introduced in the 1960s, the 'environment' has consolidated itself as a news-beat and category of news coverage, and that news coverage of the environment has gone up and down in regular cycles. Allan Mazur argues that the volume of coverage of climate change is more important than its quality, maintaining that 'Precisely what is said in the stories matters relatively little compared to the simple quantity of exposure'. Examining US news coverage from 1988 to 2004, Boykoff and Boykoff highlight a number of occasions when there was 'overt contestation' between different sources accessed by journalists, resulting in coverage that presented the views of 'duelling authorities' in a balanced way.
