Assessing Threat and Efficacy: Ideological Influences in Climate Change Reporting in US and German Newspapers (2006–2023)

This study investigates how liberal and conservative newspapers in the United States and Germany report on climate change impacts and the efficacy of mitigation actions. Building on a seminal analysis on US newspapers from 2006-2011, we extend the scope cross-culturally to German media and temporally to 2023. Using a dataset of over 29,000 articles coded with Large Language Models, we analyze trends in impact mentions, actor framing, and efficacy information. Our findings reveal that while mentions of climate change impacts, particularly domestic and present-day impacts, have modestly increased over time, newspapers in both countries continue to portray climate change in ways not likely to encourage adaptive behaviors: reporting about climate risks rarely comes with positive efficacy information about how to act. Particularly, conservative media in the US fail to provide engaging coverage. This ideological slant in climate coverage is much less pronounced in Germany. These results suggest that findings from a highly polarized context such as the US cannot be generalized to less polarized countries, highlighting the need for context-specific approaches when assessing climate communication strategies.