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Three years, eight countries: How climate news shapes public views | Otter.ai

Three years, eight countries: How climate news shapes public views

Reuters Institute56min

Mitali Mukherjee

00:41

Welcome to Our global audience that's joined in to talk to us today. We are the Reuters Institute, and we're here to talk about our most recent research, which is around climate and audiences. It feels like a politically fraught item to be discussing, particularly the way 2025 has begun, but it's been important for us at the Reuters Institute because it is an iteration of our own study of how audiences in some of the key countries that we looked at are engaging with climate news, what makes sense for them, what works, what doesn't work, and what indeed they're thinking about when they're looking at climate news. Why is this important? We believe it is critical, not just because of what it means for news organizations and how they should be communicating to their audiences, but also to highlight the fact, and maybe I'm giving the headline away, that across the eight countries, it is the news media where people engage with climate news the most. There is reason for us to remain committed to this, and maybe I'm sort of hinting at an optimistic tone over here, but we will delve into that. I'm Italian Mukherjee. I'm part of the Reuters Institute, and it is my great joy today to introduce our panelists so that we can dive right into this conversation. Dr Vikas Ajaz, who is a postdoctoral fellow at the Reuters Institute. He is the lead author of this report, the one who we have had many, many arguments and debates about on what we should and shouldn't have in this report, welcome Bucha Ivan Kurin, who is part of the crack team at AFP that looks at climate and is looking to change the world, one climate story at a time. Yvonne, such a pleasure to have you. Thank you for being here quite serendipitously, which is great, absolutely, and a good one. And Catherine Dunn, who is part of the Oxford climate journalism network, I don't think for the 700 people from the network who've joined in, she needs any introduction, but she has been sort of in the trenches herself as a journalist who's covered energy, she tracks climate, and she works very, very closely with all the journalists in the Oxford Climate Network. I know we have an hour which tends to sort of fly, so maybe we'll get right into it. I think Bucha first, it's really important to set some context on why we chose to do this report. Just for the sake of our audiences that have joined in. We consciously chose eight countries that we thought were a very good mix of both global majority and minority. We wanted to explore where the climate meant something different as a subject for audiences, whether you were living in Germany or you were in India or Pakistan. So that's the reason we had these eight countries and we wanted to explore, didn't we? Bucha, what the relationship for audiences is specifically around climate news. Tell me your big sort of takeaway, a big highlight from it, because you've been really in the in the weeds of it for the last three years now with this data. Yeah. Thank

Waqas Ejaz

03:35

you very much for having me. I think the one thing that stood out, and we have highlighted in the report as well, was how remarkably stable people have been, both in terms of engaging with the topic of climate change and how their attitudes have been over the past three years. Because this is what we have been doing across three years. We have been looking into different ideas on how people engage with climate change as a topic, and then what it does to them while, for example, consuming news, does it happens when you consume news or it doesn't? And we have, over the period of time, we have covered a range of different issues, and what for me, which stood out this year was in the in the backdrop of increased intensity of extreme weather events, increased frequency of extreme weather events, 2023 being the on record, the hottest year ever recorded. And then 2024 was again topped 2023 record as well. So in the backdrop of such drastic changes that we are seeing, I did not see that among people. There was a there was a disconnect. What I felt that people have kind of stopped paying attention the urgency of the crisis, or probably they have sort of a ceiling effect that that's the best people could come up with in terms of engaging with that topic. So that was, I guess, my sort of a surprise main finding. And now that I have, you know, published the work, we are now looking a bit deeper into why. What are the different reasons could have been to explain such inertia, which is, this is what we are calling perception, climate perception inertia in the report. So this is how I sort of say that. This is one key takeaway for me on the report,

Mitali Mukherjee

05:34

mentioning and outlining that's the double edged sword of it, isn't it? It's still sort of 3/4 of respondents saying they do believe this is important, but the fact that for the three years we've been tracking this data, it hasn't moved. And as you say, in the face of extreme weather events, not just heat, but also flooding, also fires to some degree, it's quite surprising to see that sort of response Kat, for the network and for the 700 journalists that we speak with about climate on a daily basis, is this something you're hearing sort of echoed across newsrooms, saying, I get it. It does feel like the biggest story of our lifetimes, but it doesn't seem to be moving ahead.

Katherine Dunn

06:15

Yeah, it was interesting, because when I saw the results of the study I did, think, Ah, it's not just like vibes. No, it really is this feeling of, you know, why are we struggling to break breakthrough? And I think what we have with some a lot of newsrooms, what's notable is that we're a self selecting group, right? People apply to the OC James, they want to deal with this. They want to report on this. So we get very enthusiastic people. And there are some real standout newsrooms bonds. Going to talk about AFP, where we see a real difference. But for a lot of the newsrooms, in a way, we are still hearing the same things that we heard back in 2022, when we started, which is that people come in. You know, Russia invaded Ukraine, full scale invasion, and at the start of the ocgen, and we had people coming in saying, my editors say this isn't interesting, saying we have bigger problems, saying people aren't interested. Like, I think a lot of these are actually myths or things that we have to, we have to dissect a little bit more. But they're very, very, very pervasive, and they are affecting climate journalism, and in that sense, it's no different than what we were hearing three years ago. Definitely, there are some bright spots. People are coming out. They're doing something different. They're trying something different. And compared to three years ago, we have a lot of answers. We have a lot of tangible things we can point people to, and that's what's really different. But that is also frustrating, honestly, because we have really, really tangible examples, and we have newsrooms that are doing it successfully, and it's working. So there's no excuse anymore, really. And I think I want to do a shout out to our colleague, Greg Cochran, who works with the alumni we were talking yesterday. And Greg is an amazing journalist who works on climate and culture and music, and, you know, he's one of the only people who works at this intersection, and he was talking about how, you know, in the lead the Grammys, the fiery, nobody was saying the words climate change. And that is, like, really hard to grapple with. How can you have a city be, you know, have parts of it raised to the ground, and nobody is saying these words. So, yeah, I think it should be a moment of reflection, actually, and

Mitali Mukherjee

08:24

a moment of comparison, Yvonne, because you've got countries like France, where engagement amongst our respondents seem to be much higher at the higher end, whereas you have a country like the US that's probably emerged from, let's say, a somewhat toxic relationship with the political news and the elections and climate news engagement has actually dropped off a cliff. Interestingly, that's something that gets echoed in our data from Germany as well, where you are beginning, beginning to see a much less sort of relationship between the audience and climate than we saw even two years back. What is France doing right?

Ivan Couronne

09:03

Interesting. I think the landscape in France has changed. But very recently, in the past, everything happened in the past two to three years. In the past two to three years, a lot of news organizations in France and to in 2022 we had major heat waves in France. Yeah. So I think that impacted the public's perception of climate and at the same time, in the past two years, major news organizations broadcasters adopted a climate strategy, but a full corporate editorial climate strategy. They appointed climate editors, they restructured, reorganize the newsroom, and now every night on French TV at 8pm Evening News, the top two channels, you have climate good quality climate content every single day. So it's changing. And also, one thing I was intrigued in in the report is that television news, yes, is on top, yeah. Isn't it amazing? So that tells me the old word, old world isn't dead, right, legacy media. So, and what was the number? I think 50% 50% is somewhat or strongly trust new news media for information on climate, yeah? So it's not massive, but it's still something right? Half of people, we still trust media

Mitali Mukherjee

10:25

science, yeah, can I scratch that point you made about including and representing climate news and sort of quality climate news a little bit? I think one of the frustrations we hear, both from our journalists at the network and more widely, is I've done it. I've done the hard work. I put the climate story out, but nobody's clicking. Are you getting something different from your audiences when you do make the effort to put out that kind of content?

Ivan Couronne

10:51

Yes. So we're news agencies, so we we distribute our content, yeah, news organizations, so when they pick up our stories, it's because they think their readers will want to read about it. Now give you a concrete examples before taking this job. I heard that cops, you know, boring and everyone turns off from cup coverage. I looked at the data during the last two cups, the last three cups. This is among everyday during pub. It was among the top three or five stories of any news stories we put out there during that period. We had at the same time, Gaza, Ukraine, the Trump transition. And still, cop coverage is always on the top or near the top. So let's, let's see the data before I

Mitali Mukherjee

11:41

explain a little bit, because our research has to point a different way with cop. But we can talk about that because I think the big chunk when we were sort of discussing what the research should and could look at was extreme weather, and that's the other one that's difficult to get a handle on, as you said right at the start where, across the eight countries, there was a very, very keen understanding that extreme weather was impacting our respondents. It was impacting their families, but it doesn't seem to have translated into a clearer connection with climate change.

Waqas Ejaz

12:16

Yeah, one of the things that, again, I mean, there, there are a lot of things to unpack, but this was a bit of surprising to me, because we hear from from the news media. Of course, there's a thing happened here, B thing happened here. So a lot of continuous frequency of extreme weather events across the globe, and the number is growing. But what we saw in the data was that people are still, I mean, between 20 to 40% across all or at least four different types of events that we ask about, hurricane, floods, extreme heat. They have always been they haven't seen the change in be it their own ability to cope or understand the risk such extreme weather pose. They haven't seen any change of in the occurrence of these extreme weather events, in how government handles such crisis, and they haven't even so there's a there is a small shift, event to event, and then country to country. Because, of course, when you're talking about floods, they are, it is much more prevalent across all countries that we are looking into. But then we are when we are talking about wildfire, you don't hear wildfires happening in Pakistan, for example. So people's affinity to such events make sense, that they there. There's less affinity of such events, or occurrence of such events in specific countries. But overall, for me, it was kind of something to ponder on, that there is a large majority, not majority, but significant number of people are still do not see this as it has changed, or these events are changing, the way they need to think about both their personal capacity to deal with it, their risk assessment, risk assessment, or the government's ability to handle that. So I think this, this is somehow, and I don't know, I mean, we can go back and discuss what you mentioned about cop, because, as Mahdi mentioned, we have some data that points to a different direction, but I think there is a lot that needs to be done because the media, and we looked further down in the report that, how does these public perception towards the extreme weather events kind of link to their daily news consumption? And we did not see a lot of variation, except in one which was people are people who consume more news, they are much more likely to see this, the risk of these extreme weather events. That was the only bit where I saw that the more news you consume, the more likely it is that you have this understanding that the risks are going higher, other than that, in terms of government response, in the personal capacity, how to deal with it, or the just the this change of in severity of extreme weather event, it has nothing to do with how media covers these issues that

Mitali Mukherjee

15:11

thread out exactly that one a bit more. And you know, for people who are joining in online, I want to go over that line in our report, which is to say that respondents who consume climate news more frequently are more likely to view extreme weather events as worsening and to feel personally at risk. And that probably speaks back to the greater challenge for news publishers, which is news avoidance in the first place, which is people not coming and engaging with news in order to feel like they have either, you know, a keener understanding of these extreme weather events, or the causes of it, or the impact of it, that speaks to a larger challenge, doesn't it?

Waqas Ejaz

15:47

It does, and we have some data to that suggest why people are not so engaged. Well, first of all, we need to sort of contextualize it. We are the news media specifically is dealing with declining news trust in general, and increase in news avoidance, and it is regardless of any type of news avoidance. So, and of course, climate is also part of the the agenda these days. So if we are seeing this increase avoidance, that that should be put in the into the context, and you're right, this issue continues to be a big one for the news organization. But one of the reasons, or some of the reasons that come up in our data, is like people see that because it negatively impacts my mood, so I avoiding news. Yeah, climate news, and another, at least, if I'm remembering the number right, it's 27% people said that there's nothing new for me in climate news stories, so that's why I'm avoiding news. And then the third bit was, I don't trust media, but I don't pay too much attention on that, because this is something I mean media can be victim of low trust anytime or on any specific topic. But I think these two or three things, which are the effective engagement or the emotional response, how people consume climate news, and overall, the lack of newness. And I have, over the years, grappled with the idea that, how come news organization kind of make it bring the newness in a story. And to be fair, with the people, they're not wrong. I mean, you have a wildfire, and there's so much you can incorporate the newness in it. I mean, that's that's about it. So I think there is some sort of disconnect in what people when they consume climate news, they have a sort of a different kind of understanding what it could be, whereas they they're not fully equipped to understand how news media maybe work, uh, be it any climate beat or any other beat. So I think that that somehow kind of, uh, impact how people are still disengaging themselves from climate change news, because

Mitali Mukherjee

18:04

I'm sort of in the lucky position of only throwing the questions and not providing the answers. Yvonne, let me draw you in on that which is and you and I spoke, you know, a few weeks back about heat, for example, the fact that newsrooms weren't quite equipped to be handling the kind of heat in which they were reporting. What can we do to provide sort of newness and nuance and something for someone who isn't engaged with the news but might, as one believes, be part of the younger generation that is engaged with climate? No, I think

Ivan Couronne

18:38

right. I think people can show that sometimes it's repetitive and no one wants to read the same story. Sorry, twice, so, let alone three, four. So I always say the most important climate event of the year for the media is not cop. It's the summer. So this is what we have to prepare for. So I'm not preparing cop at all. Right, now I'm preparing the summit. So news organizations should have a plan. We know that's going to be extreme weather event this summer, and summer is already in the southern hemisphere right now. Summer in the Northern Hemisphere is starting. You can have a heat wave in April, right? Yeah. So there's a list of things you should do. Do you have guidelines, like written guidelines for your newsroom, not just for your climate reporters, yeah, but for the people who are going to cover the flooding or the or the heat wave, or

Mitali Mukherjee

19:31

covering an election rally in the middle of June, which is sort of intense for your last degree

Ivan Couronne

19:35

Education reporter is going to cover schools closing because it's too hot. So have you trained your journalist? Have you trained talk to your business editors, your political editors? Yeah, because they're going to cover this is it's going to be breaking news when when schools close and when there's a disaster, and the government response is not up to the task, so you have to prepare all of this, and there's a lot of safety also. And this is something we at AFG we're developing very, very strongly. Like, literally, how are you going to dress when you're going to cover that fire? Like, what kind of clothes you have to wear? How do you park your car near a fire? So we have our own guidelines. I mean, a lot of organizations do, but how much water do you take when you go in Brazil? Cover a flood like For how many days do you take food? Are you going to recharge your batteries? All of this, this needs to be prepared.

Mitali Mukherjee

20:32

And Kat, this is the interesting one, which is that, again, in the research that we conducted, we found there was a greater preference for local news, but I think I would broaden that to actually imply personal relevance. And I want to do a Meera kalpa, because I'm the one who always says every story is a climate story, a business story, certainly a climate story. Does it feel like that's not the case when you speak to journalists, that it's not sort of, I can't insert climate everywhere, but I can bring personal relevance to a story and then engage with the climate side of it. I

Katherine Dunn

21:07

still think most stories can be a climate story. It's, it's all just about maybe I'm like, not every story, no, no, not every story, but a little align often when we're telling people put more climate and they think, well, this and the angle. And he said, it's a line, you know, the LA fires, maybe every story, it'll be a practical stuff insurance. It'll be about all this stuff. Sometimes all you need is a line. Sometimes, like, sometimes it is such low hanging fruit. And, like, I have a connection there, but I want to go back to, like, what Yvonne said, which is so last year we did an annual event on heat. And I thought I knew about heat, but I was like, Oh, wow. This is like, this is not just this is bad, but this is something we can prepare for, and something we should prepare for and for newsrooms where we try not to be prescriptive about what they should do. One of the things started like, really saying is, like, develop a heat strategy. Climate might feel really bad, big, really political, really complex, but start with heat because I want to know it's July 4. I want to know, can I go for a run? Will my dog go into heat stroke if I take him out? If somebody's pregnant, should they go outside? Like these are really, really, really tangible choices that people are making about their health, and that is why we need heat coverage. And so I'm Canadian, I'm from Western wildfire coverage. Like, what boots do you need? The Aussies have figured this out. But like, you need your boots not to melt. That's the kind in California they were wearing. The wrong masks they need to be wearing. Go to Home Depot and get the right mask. Like, this is stuff we can prepare for. We should prepare for. It is dangerous, but it's also the stuff that, like, it is a life and death issue, right? And for public broadcasters, this is, like, what we are there to do at the end of the day. And like, we need to be giving people that information. And if climate feels too big and feel too complicated, start with heat. And also you can do buildings, you can do infrastructure, you can do sports. We did loads on the Olympics last summer. How did the Olympics train? The Olympians train? If Paris was maybe 40 degrees, like they all had to train. They had to prepare to not pass out on the tennis court. So it's just really, really, really tangible. And I think also it goes back to local news. When people say they want local news, they're not getting it because the media ecosystem. They're saying they want stuff that's useful. Yeah, tell me, can I take my dog for a walk? Like, how scared do I need to be if I'm pregnant and it's 40 degrees? Like, food

Mitali Mukherjee

23:36

inflation, right? Yeah, the prices of, yeah, vegetables and why? So did you want to come in on a point? Yeah, so

Ivan Couronne

23:42

climate Okay, is part of every story, but let's be very careful when we write and we and because you don't want a legal disclaimer kind of effect at the end of the bottom of a story, scientists, scientists like climate change, blah, blah, blah, maybe people will. We're in a different time today, and I think we have to be careful about the language. And think one way to address that is to be very concrete and say, okay, the Gulf of Mexico has never been harder, and this is how it's feeding the intensity of storms. And this is much more efficient and it's less maybe for some readers, it's going to be more acceptable as language and as efficient. I think it's Win win, because you expect explain the mechanism without talking about climate change in general, which might seem abstract, and some people maybe so.

Mitali Mukherjee

24:39

Not everything raised. But some events are climate facing, such as cop with us, and we were, you know, quite interested in intrigue to see what the data would look like. Because while the survey was out, was when cop was actually underway. So you would think there was a lot bubbling in terms of things and intonation. But there were two sort of, I don't want to say down, but two learnings, one on cop engagement, and the other on how young people perceive cop.

Waqas Ejaz

25:06

Well, if anybody who you know is very enthusiastic about cop, he should read out about because there's a lot of positive things that people actually feel about cop. I don't know this could be because of their social desirability bias, which basically means that when they are filling out the surveys, they want to look the greener than the next guy, basically. So they want to come off as I am the biggest climate enthusiastic. So that's, that's how I want to respond to this array. But all in all, what we have seen, in well, the I have seen and worked with a lot of different people. This is now pretty much kind of established fact that climate change across the media, across different countries, is very episodic. So when you have different events like Co Op, you certainly see the jump. So what I was mentioning was pretty much the result of that sudden interest, and people want to it's a big event, and we went in with the same hope that maybe we would see a sort of a jump across people news consumption. Back in two years, when we in 2022 and 23 we fielded the questionnaire in a different time. These times it coincidentally overlapped with, at least in some countries. So we were, I was hoping to see that uptick, yeah, I did not see that. So which is reaffirming the fact that, again, there is a ceiling that people want to commit to the idea, regardless of how big the event is, yeah, and the second is that cop is not generating anything additional news worth information for people. And frankly, this last cop was pretty much, I'm called me pessimistic or not, but that I did not see anything good that come out of the COVID, at least the last one, okay, in Dubai, probably. But I mean, people are right not to engage or suddenly show us that, oh, there is a strong, certain uptick in in we are very much excited, just because cop is happening. I did not see that. And there are many, many reasons. And as you mentioned about young people. We can, we can go into a lot of details. Why is it the case? But young people are usually a lot more optimistic. I would say so. I think that they that's, that's what we see in the data as well. Their optimistic take on the

Mitali Mukherjee

27:34

call. The word for you is not pessimistic, diplomatic. But for the sake of our you know, online audience, I am going to rattle off some of those numbers again, and then we can talk a bit about it, which is that, on average, across eight countries, 14% had never heard of COP. 21% acknowledged they had heard but knew nothing about it. A majority, 61% said they did know something about it. And within the young respondents, they were more likely to view cop positively. But I think it's important to say that a notable 53% of that young population, which is 18 to 24 still view cop as a major failure for the climate, a sentiment that sort of tended to increase with age. I guess, the question you know, that struck me when we were processing all this, and Ivan and Karen love to hear from both of you is whether it was cop a town square moment, and is it no longer that? And do we need an alternate Town Square moment which sort of brings people together to talk about climate? Where you're you are talking about climate. It's not a sentence being inserted. It's not an also wanted to say,

Ivan Couronne

28:43

I think our expectations for COP are

Mitali Mukherjee

28:46

too high, too high. Scratch that

Ivan Couronne

28:49

town square. No Town Square is when you had the Fridays for future demonstrations, when you have some kind of major climate event in the country. This is where, when that is the Tom's question, when you have a debate, maybe, I mean, they're having a debate on rebuilding Los Angeles. They have had a huge debate in Valencia the floods, right? So this is where you have the national conversation.

Katherine Dunn

29:19

Yeah,

I think cop is really interesting. We do a lot of preparation with the members on cop and how to we get them to invite their editors and planning conversations. And people are going to do it really differently, right? If they're specialists or they're not. But I also think, you know, the last few cops were maybe not the best and rallying moment, they felt

Mitali Mukherjee

29:41

a little diplomacy. Yes, you

Katherine Dunn

29:45

know, a lot of fossil fuel you know, a lot of suppression of civil society. Wasn't a great vibe. I would say, I think expectations going into this last one were incredibly, incredibly low. But yes, again, I think one of the things that I always think about with the DNR and past reports is sometimes some of the cop coverage. It's replicating some of the elements of political journalism that in every single digital news report audiences are saying they do not like. So what you know, we know climates can be a very difficult topic. We know politics right now is a very difficult topic. Why are we using the same formula? It is maybe a very North American term inside baseball. It is really, you know, if you're running, if you're working for a political blog, a climate blog, you can get in the weeds. But for regular people, this is photos of Boris Johnson. This is people meeting. They may as well be covering g7 in Davos with an apocalypse sort of tone to it all. It's just, you know, like a live blog on cop, I would just say, not waste your money, your time. Watch the big themes. We tell people, go and source, go and get loads of ideas. But like it's got to feel local. It's got to feel tangible. And I think if we could trade out a few less cop stories for a few more local biodiversity stories, stories that sometimes editors think are actually quite soft and fluffy. We talked to scientists over and over and over again, and they say for the lowest hanging fruit that will make the biggest difference tomorrow, going into your local community and write a local biodiversity story about somebody restoring their local park. And you might think it sounds like, what difference will that make? Will all be done tomorrow? You know, forget it. No, like these are the stories that actually have a lot of science behind them and and I think if you read these stories, you do feel better. So that's what I would say about cop we're not going to stop doing them. They're big geopolitical themes, and there's loads of money. But yeah, throwing all of our eggs in the cop basket, I don't think is.

Mitali Mukherjee

31:52

And I think what you're saying goes right back to the point in the report as well, also at Bible cast, which is about personal relevance. Yvonne, I want to talk a little bit about how to tell these stories, because that's the other takeaway, just as we've seen with our larger audience surveys, it is video that is the most popular form, and this sort of cuts across age groups that we that we looked at. It is short form video that they seem to be engaging with more is that the syntax we need to be thinking about when we're talking about climate,

Ivan Couronne

32:23

yeah, I mean, and also you have to think, we have to make sure we do stories that robots won't be able to do, right? So you have to be on the ground, and, you know, because you still need humans to shoot that story and and take pictures. And so, I mean, I can only talk about what we do. We always, we try and always send, you know, a text reporter and a photographer and a VJ on any on every assignment, because that's what the media want, right? They want. They want a very visual story. So, and we kind of split between the impact stories, climate change, impact stories and responses, but this is really hard to find original angles, right? Because I think that's boring news avoidance. Yeah, you don't want to do the always the same stories, and this is where it's really hard. And so you need to build literacy in your newsroom. You need to train them into guidelines. You need to go. We have a checklist at AFG. Well, does is this a real response to climate change? Is it replicable? Is it, I mean, it's basically inspired by solutions to journalism, right? Yeah. And so, yeah, yeah, and use a lot of data as well.

Mitali Mukherjee

33:41

Yeah, it's a good segue, because to talk about our findings on misinformation, I know that a lot of the scientific community we've been interacting with have sort of felt it more keenly. I think in the last year and a half, the kind of pushback they've faced on climate related conversations or climate related research, what did we find around misinformation specifically?

Waqas Ejaz

34:05

Well, it's a very, very hot thing to talk about misinformation in general, and then climate misinformation is also kind of something that people would want to know about, because a lot of the time we attribute inaction on be it on the governmental side or on people's behavior change. We attribute this to, oh, they must have come across some sort of misinformation of climate change. Oh, there is no climate there is no consensus among scientists and so forth. So we wanted to, we have been doing it for last three years, and again, across three years, it's stagnant. Whoever believed in all those climate related misinformation. I wouldn't say he's the same person, but that person continues or similar. Kind of percentage is across three years at aggregate level. And when we look at within countries, things do not change. So people who are, for example, some countries, are very much more people were like we are exposed to misinformation and on climate change in high 40s, they continue to be the same case. But I think it's worth mentioning. Sort of the caveat here is, this is the perceived misinformation. You know, I think this, the information I'm getting is a misinformation. So I'm not 100% sure, because the follow up question to this we normally ask is, how much do you think that you have come across? You know, how frequently you come across? And we don't have a, you know, on average, it's like 20. 25% people say that I come across clever misinformation frequently. So it is out there. It is in different pockets of our information ecosystem. I won't diminish its impact, but I don't exaggerate it as well. It is not we need to talk about that, but if you ask me honestly, it, there are very few people in very few places with very few attributes in common who are both engaging with that kind of information, consume that kind of information, and then across spread it across the information landsca And I

Mitali Mukherjee

36:15

think it's worth mentioning, for some of these countries like India, in general, levels of concern around misinformation are very high India and South Africa, as we found consistently. So it seems to sort of also extend into climate related news. I'm going to pose with my questions, because there's a whole bunch of them coming in online. And thank you to Diego argedas Ortiz, who runs the Oxford Climate Network, for sort of supporting with sending these questions across. Glad to have you here in presence in some sort. Muriel Thornton and I know Bucha, this is something we debated last year. Has a question around, could you discuss how audience responds to coverage of climate activism?

Waqas Ejaz

36:56

We had it. Thank you, Germany. We looked at this specifically, and we had, you know, just stop oil and the protest around that. So what we call direct action, not V but JSO, just drop oil themselves from them. As you know, disruptive protest, or direct action protests. Well, we also have some of the questions this, but we haven't really published that in the report. We'll be doing that later on. I think overall, such protests are not very, very much welcomed among public. There is a very strong opposition, majority of people. And when I say majority, I mean we're talking about more than 60 65% people who are not supportive of such disruptive direct action protests. It doesn't really matter how you know, is it throwing soup on sunflower or is it gluing yourself on the road? This is not the way people see this, and some countries are more, have more strong opinion towards that compared to the others. For example, Germany being two years data, and we still see that Germans are somehow, they are very against this idea of disruption. And we continue to look into this, and I think there is a lot to unpack here, but I hope that the I have the answer, because I can't really go much into the detail how people, normally, you know, have much more nuanced information. There's one bit more, perhaps, is that we ask people, do they think that media covers their coverage of such events fairly or not well? This is also something that people consider that media's criticism on such events is fair. So because those who support who do not support such activism, they also think media is covering these events as fairly regardless how negative or how how critical that coverage is, so that kind of aligns with people's expectation on the activism side.

Mitali Mukherjee

39:15

And Ivan, there's a question from Ronald Joy Mahdi, who's also a former network member saying, What are your views on tailoring climate journalism to niche audiences of the already hyper climate aware, instead of seeking to inform the broad public? Is there a model to explore to provide sort of high quality information, news and perspective on climate? I mean, for

Ivan Couronne

39:39

that's not what we want to do. Yeah, we're a general news organization, and so we try and make it as as broad as we can, meaning it has to be understandable by anyone. So that means using simple language, concrete, not abstract words, a very human level, so, but it doesn't mean that a tailored that was the world, right, a tailored niche audience is not interested in what we do when we do a very, very, very, very, we did a very Nice story out of Pakistan about monsoon brides, which I can send you the link. Please do but tell us about it. It's in Pakistan, and it's about families before a major flooding, they would marry their young daughters to get the dowry. Dowry. This is a climate story, right? This is climate finance story, almost. And so we so this is very, I've never seen that story elsewhere. This. This is, this fits really well with the people who are extremely climate focused. But anyone can read it, yeah,

Mitali Mukherjee

41:00

I think it's also worth mentioning that even in our broader research, the challenge is not that the hyper sort of served are not being served enough. I think there's more than enough information for those who are right at the top end of the pyramid. I think the challenge is that a lot of sections feel quite separate from the news. The news environment. They don't feel reflected or represented. I don't think they see personal relevance. So just want to add that in Umar is a question from Pakistan. So I'm just taking the liberty of showing that you, despite our vulnerabilities in Pakistan, the report shows that views on serious climate impacts have dropped by eight percentage points. I'm interested in hearing the experts explain expand on that decline. Is it more about the last climates events fading in sort of proximity, and I guess impact, given that it happened almost three years ago, or are there other reasons? And I imagine the arrow is being pointed towards politically. I

Waqas Ejaz

42:04

mean, there's, frankly, there's no rocket science to it. The since the flooding in 2022 a lot has changed, of course, both politically and in terms of climate change as well. And I think partially it is the environment to blame, the political environment to blame. And secondly, how the media actually works in Pakistan, and we were talking about heat earlier. I mean, in countries like India and Pakistan, we don't have heat is a problem, but we have sort of now we normally say we have six weathers instead of four, we have we used to have winter, summer, autumn and spring. Now we have one for smog and one for monsoon or flooding. In other words, so we have six seasons which we can predict when they are going to start, when they going to end, how bad they are going to be, pretty much exactly how we could have done it across the four season so, and this is how the media works in Pakistan. So certainly, when the smog season begins, you know, the media is going to talk about this from November till the end of probably January. There's going to be a lot of discussion on that. And then certainly there is a drop. But I think what happened in the last year was extreme political and economic turmoil in the country where the news has been, uh, solely focused on how to get out of that crisis. And seems like there is the the climate, the existential crisis, seems like taken, has taken a back seat. And I have spoken to different people in Pakistan as well journalists who are covering it, they are talking about the same thing that people are much more interested in talking about these immediate things, how to get this crisis over with. And then they are, you know, going to talk about climate change. And remember, we are talking about a country of two, 40 million people, where where the situation is much more dire compared to probably countries in Western Europe or in North America. But somehow they they believe that they would survive the day, but their the political or economic challenges need to be solved rather immediately. Yeah, and

Mitali Mukherjee

44:16

that question is from Hamad, sir, for us, also, I think a network member from Pakistan, there's a question about disinformation, which I think we've addressed, but there's a second part to it, which is, how do we navigate this on social media? And I think that's probably something you know, our community is thinking about, which is, I think about video, but do I also think about the platforms where I want to talk about this? Do I want to do Tiktok videos. Do I want to be on Instagram? Do I want to make YouTube shorts? Do I want to do none of the above?

Katherine Dunn

44:49

Are they talking in terms of the responses they would get or the engagement they might get? Yeah,

Mitali Mukherjee

44:53

I think it's Yeah.

Katherine Dunn

44:59

Even maybe you have a better answer on this one,

Ivan Couronne

45:02

how many people get the news from influencers compared to

Waqas Ejaz

45:06

we don't really ask about the influencers, per se. We just focus on different platforms and and social media and online platforms are sort of distinguished by, you know, by individual naming individual platforms, and the specific platforms, like, for example, carbon brief, is being sort of touted as online, special online platforms. So we don't really talk we have sort of clubbed social media together. Otherwise it would have been, you know, there are so many platforms throughout but actually, so that been a very long question.

Ivan Couronne

45:39

I think we have to, I think who, which news media are successful on Tiktok. Evan, oh, very successful. I think a lot of influencers are news

Mitali Mukherjee

45:53

media. Has it's only just begun their journey on Tiktok, hasn't it? Were they even present there too?

Ivan Couronne

45:58

But I think influence some influencers, of individuals a bigger audience is general than us, so we try and we do great stuff us and others do even better. But I think the challenge is, where do those influencers, those individuals who have a big audience, where do they get their news, and how do we work with them. Or how do they, how do we make sure they put out rigorous stuff? Am

Mitali Mukherjee

46:24

I reading from what you're saying that the idea is not to be think about the platforms, but think about the stories and sort of keep it, keep it in your specific organization and on your platform? Is that? No?

Ivan Couronne

46:36

I mean, yeah. I mean, I want to know. My question. It's more of a question those individuals, those influencers on Tiktok, were big audience. Where do they get their news from themselves? This is who we have to reach. In a way, it's the

Mitali Mukherjee

46:50

same thing as the community notes, isn't it? Where? I mean, where are the community notes coming from? Where did they get that information?

Katherine Dunn

46:56

Because I was a little about the question, but I did have something to say, where we're now. It feels, and I've heard this in very like off, you know, behind the scenes conversations sometimes with people very senior at news organizations, where they will talk about the level of disinformation they get, they will talk about the level of harassment the reporters get. Everything will be picked, and they'll get these horrible messages on Twitter. And, you know, it is interesting sometimes, as you're hearing this, and this is not a nice experience, and obviously news organizations should think about how to keep their reporters safe. But I also think there is a danger, even among a lot of news organizations, about conflating the people who spend loads and loads of time spreading disinformation and harassing journalists online as being a sizable part of the news audience. Because I think in the report there, it says, like, how many people, what percentage people actually do not believe that climate change is happening? And am I wrong in saying something like 8% it's really small. It's really small. And that number includes the United States. Let's, you know, come on, right? They're probably skewing

Mitali Mukherjee

47:59

them not saying that because she's Canadian. Well, like, look at the numbers

Katherine Dunn

48:03

in the United States. I talked to Yvonne on the way here. Like it's so polarized too. We're all consuming bucket loads of American political news every day. I'm not saying it's the wrong choice, but we're doing it. We're just like, taking a shower in it. And sometimes we're forgetting how extreme the US is and how extreme the polarization is and how extreme the disinformation coming from the talk, and we are conflating being loud with being a large majority of people. So I have spoken to news bosses where they basically say that they try not to do that much climate coverage because the blowback is so bad, and I'm thinking, well, you're letting a bunch of really angry retired people dictate your new strategy. I mean, come on, we know people care. We know it's hard for them to think about we know it can be depressing and lack novelty, but they do care, and they do believe in this stuff. So, you know, that is something I would say, is some I do think it's really important, and usually it's coming from the top, not some retired guy online, like, let's be clear where it's coming from. But I would not let that derail your strategy. I would try to build a climate strategy for the people who actually matter, which is the vast majority of your audience, over 90% so that's what I say about disability, yeah. And I really got excited. I was

Mitali Mukherjee

49:19

just going to say you will be surprised how many old and retired people there are in India. Some of them go on to have political careers, and then many of them find their way on social media. We have

Katherine Dunn

49:30

thing against the respired people. So

Mitali Mukherjee

49:34

we have eight or nine minutes left, and I want to hold this space for you to express you know, your thoughts about this. And I think the one that I want to hold on to that is that it is still the case that the news media is responsible for the bulk of people's engagement with climate news and information. And I hold that personally quite close, because, you know, what do we want news publishers to take away from this, and it's the same question for all of

Waqas Ejaz

50:05

you. Well, this seems like a very easy question, but very difficult to take on. And I have been asked this question many, many times, honestly, the right answer would be, there is no one size fit all solution here you have to, I think if there's one thing that that news organization can pivot is just focus on your audience specifically that those audience analytics would tell you a lot, because I have heard people from I have been in a room with people from Denmark, and they have told me the editor have told me the fascinating story how a long form journalistic piece about how to build a sustainable house in Denmark has done tremendously well against I mean, I would say I personally thought that long form journalism is pretty much gone now. But he explained to me that how detailed the piece was, in a sense that how to source a lumber from, how to get the sustainable choices to buy things from, in order to make a sustainable house in Denmark. I mean, come on, in Denmark, you expect people are already very conscious about environmental issues, but still they wanted to pay attention to these things. So I think it is very much audience centric. It should be. I mean, you can't have one kind of story works across contexts. I have seen that in Pakistan as well. People do not want to, you know, and journalists actually, this is, I mean, I don't, I know a lot of journalists won't like it, but they people can see through the rehashing of climate stories. And I have, I have people confided with me that they this is what they have been doing, and that's partly the reason that people are kind of disengaging, or sometimes they do not feel like reading that. So I would say that if focus on your audience, if you have an audience or young people, they would want to know the solution, what to do, and very hyper local context, despite this being a global issue, but the solutions and what how to talk about this comes from a very, very like you mentioned. It comes from very localized contexts.

Ivan Couronne

52:28

It's clear the media is in the worst crisis of its modern history, for sure, but people still believe in truth, and we see it in your reports, right? The proportion of people that trust scientists is the highest. There's some countries that's really high. Yeah. So people trust scientists. It feels like it's everything's changing. We're in a cultural revolution where there's no more truth or lies, but actually no people believe in truth. And so this is, let's not we have to adapt. We have to change clearly, or we won't survive. We have AI, there's a lot of things that are changing, and there's a lot of problems with, you know, we're attacked, harassed, but still people believe in we have to fight. I mean, the value of truth is still there, right? Still a lot of people want it.

Katherine Dunn

53:23

Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, like, something I kind of say over and over and over again, but like, we're going to cover climate change, and it doesn't matter how chaotic and awful, oh, I should not be honest Trump is, but like, we're still going to cover it, because Los Angeles was still on fire and Pakistan was still underwater, and these are still huge stories. So we've had a choice for the last several years, and we still face a choice, like we're going to cover them. So are you going to do it? Well, you have to do it. Why don't you do it better? And also, I would say, you know, from a young having this conversation, whereas it's actually interesting, because there's a lot of when people are putting the time, the resources and the effort in, they're experimenting a lot with climate journalism. And when we figure out some of these things on climate journalism, when we can figure out climate stories that do really, really well, which NRK in Norway, again, like an insanely popular story about the climate and the sea that every single person in Norway apparently read five times. It was crazy. Once these stories do well, what was my point? I lost my

Ivan Couronne

54:32

point. Climate journalists are rethinking the way they do like crazy, and it's been happening for years, right? Everyone is up to solutions journalism, I don't think political journalisms journalism or foreign affairs journalism, or the way we cover conflicts, geopolitics, diplomacy, yeah. So, you know,

Katherine Dunn

54:57

yeah, and they're in a crisis too. I mean, come on, we're all in a crisis together, let's be honest. But we see that political journalism is really in a crisis. And if we can figure some of this out, we can experiment, use some of these things, push back against some of the conventions, you know, then the political desk can start following what we're doing. And I think that would be great.

Mitali Mukherjee

55:17

I think the slider may have ended somewhere between optimistic and pessimistic. Thank you to my panelists. I think we're out of time for our online conversation. I want to say that we're in a room at the Reuters Institute, and we have an in person audience, which is outstanding mid career journalists from across the world, and we're going to be having more of a detailed conversation after this. But thank you to everyone that's joined in, if you found this fascinating and you want to engage with it more, you can head to our website for Reuters Institute for the Study of journalism. You can subscribe to our newsletter. And if you want to be a part of the Oxford Climate Network, we open up applications every September. So look out for that. Write to us. We want to engage with people who want to engage with climate I'm going to take a beat here to thank our panelists and of course thank you all for joining in. This is Reuters Institute for the Study of journalism, goodbye.

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