Extreme silence: How the U.S. media have failed to connect climate change to extreme heat in 2018

This report examines media coverage of extreme heat and climate change from January 1 to July 8, 2018, as well as in the context of the major heat event that spread over the Northern Hemisphere over a twelve-day period starting on June 27 and ending on July 8. The report considers a range of sources: the top 50 U.S. newspapers by circulation, national programming from ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News Network, MSNBC, and NBC, and newspaper coverage in the 13 states in which 10 or more heat records were broken during the period.

With a few notable exceptions, major U.S. media outlets are largely failing to connect these monumental weather events to climate change. Similarly, when local media report on record-breaking temperatures and extended heat waves that directly affect their readers, they typically fail to connect the events to the warming trends that scientists have been predicting for years. In fact, this report finds that media were significantly less likely to connect extreme heat to climate change when reporting during a major heat event.