Scientists are pretty sure that Earth is hotter than at any time in the last 125,000 years, but the news media is moving on, trying to keep on top of a fire hose of pressing news — from the daily chaos of the Trump administration to the breaking developments in the war on Iran. The shift in attention started during the COVID-19 pandemic and, despite a temporary rebound, has gathered pace in recent years: Since its peak in 2021, global news coverage of climate change has dropped 38 percent, according to data from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Media and Climate Change Observatory.

Many journalists have been busy digging through 3 million pages of the Epstein files rather than the latest scientific report, though you can still find news about some of the biggest recent findings, including that estimates of sea level rise have been dramatically underestimated and that global warming has accelerated “significantly” over the past decade.

Last year, the first of Trump’s second term, major broadcast networks in the U.S. cut their climate coverage 35 percent compared to the year before, according to a recent report by Media Matters, a watchdog organization. “The competition, the ‘flood the zone’ strategy from the administration, is making it very difficult for anything that’s not super urgent in this moment,” said Allison Fisher, director of the climate and energy program at the nonprofit.

The change in focus has real-world consequences. When media coverage of a topic dies down, it can be hard to drum up enthusiasm for protests and policy changes. It’s out of sight, out of mind, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Normal people don’t spend their time reading scientific papers or talking to a climate scientist over their backyard fence. “Like, literally, billions of people know about climate change only because the media has reported it,” Leiserowitz said.

When writers and editors prioritize — or deprioritize — a particular subject, that sends a signal to both policymakers and the public. “They exercise one of the very most powerful tools in politics, which is to define what topics are talked about and what topics are not talked about, and within that, what range of opinion is ventilated on those topics,” said Mark Hertsgaard, the co-founder and executive director of Covering Climate Now, a nonprofit pushing for more rigorous coverage of climate change. “So of course, when we stop talking about climate change in the press, the public figures, ‘Oh, well, I guess it’s not that important anymore,’ or ‘Maybe they figured it out’ or whatever.”

You can see the recent downswing in climate coverage in the U.S. by looking at some of the country’s biggest legacy newspapers: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. While the New York Times has published an enormous volume of articles about global warming, its coverage has plunged, declining by 66 percent since its peak in October 2021, when it published 646 articles mentioning the subject, and this January, when it published 221.

People are noticing the decline. Back in 2022, 35 percent of Americans said they heard about global warming in the media at least once a week, according to data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. As of the most recent data in December, only 17 percent did. 

If you take the long view, neglecting climate change is actually the norm in the U.S. mainstream media, Hertsgaard said. Around 2019, though, they began to pay more attention. Young people around the world started skipping school on Fridays to demand their governments take action on climate change, inspired by the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. Leading up to the 2020 election in the U.S., progressives’ excitement over the “Green New Deal” pressured future president Joe Biden to adopt plans to take on climate change. At the same time, organizations like Hertsgaard’s Covering Climate Now, founded in 2019, pushed media outlets around the globe to connect the dots to extreme weather, providing context about how greenhouse gas emissions had enhanced flooding, fueled wildfires, and worsened drought.

“When you can get those two things together — a surge of media coverage at the same time as a surge of popular opinion and mobilization, and 7 million people in the street — that’s when you can break the climate silence,” Hertsgaard said.

The volume of climate change news dipped during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it quickly picked up again as world leaders started passing policies to address rising greenhouse gas emissions. Biden made tackling climate change a priority, and in 2022, he signed the country’s first comprehensive climate law, filled with incentives to prompt a faster switch to clean technologies. (It’s been mostly repealed under President Donald Trump.)

Then, just like that, the media’s zeal for covering climate change started fading again, and experts aren’t sure exactly why. Perhaps the passage of major climate legislation in the U.S. led to a decreased sense of urgency. The decline in climate news continued to deepen in 2025, when global coverage fell another 14 percent from the year before, and was especially noticeable in the United States.

After Trump took office with a promise to “drill, baby, drill,” a widespread “climate hushing” fell across the country. Businesses suddenly stopped talking about the climate pledges they’d been trumpeting a few years earlier. Many congressional Democrats avoided talking about climate change directly, with the phrase vanishing from their speeches, social media accounts, and podcast appearances. Then the Trump administration went after news outlets, pulling public broadcasting funding from NPR and PBS stations and threatening to revoke the broadcast licenses of major networks over coverage Trump didn’t like. 

“You have corporate media owners who are increasingly fearful of running afoul of the Trump administration that characterizes climate change as a ‘hoax’ and climate action as a ‘scam,’ right?” Fisher said. 

Fisher said she was alarmed by the lack of coverage on ABC, CBS, and NBC of the Trump administration’s actions to scale back climate research and environmental regulations, as well as the decline in connecting extreme weather to climate change.

CBS had long led climate coverage among broadcast networks, but that focus changed suddenly late last year, Media Matters found. Earlier in the year, the Trump administration approved a merger between Paramount Global (which owns CBS) and Skydance Media. Brandon Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, suggested the merger would ensure “a diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum” at the network. Soon after the appointment of its new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, in October, CBS laid off most of its climate team, along with about 1,000 other employees. One of the network’s few remaining climate segments in the months since focused on polar bear populations thriving in the Norwegian Arctic despite melting sea ice, a common talking point among climate deniers. “Experts say the bears are still in trouble long term, but hey, the experts have been wrong before,” said Tony Dokoupil, anchor of Evening News, to end the segment.

“We know what they’re saying on Fox News — it looks almost exactly the same,” Fisher said. “Beyond the volume, I think this shift in the way the climate story is being told is even more dangerous.” 

Layoffs have swept across the news industry, with The Washington Post dismissing the majority of its climate team last month, more than a dozen reporters and editors, as part of extensive cuts. Max Boykoff, an environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who tracks media coverage, suggested that newsroom decisions to shift their attention away from climate change could be driven by a sense that there’s “climate fatigue” among the public — a weariness around a long-running crisis with no easy solutions. “Editors may be assessing that and putting people on different beats,” he said. The waning enthusiasm from outlets to highlight climate stories has frustrated some journalists: The longtime NBC climate reporter Chase Cain recently resigned from his role, saying he was exhausted from fighting to get his stories on air. 

Leiserowitz, at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, stressed that the number of Americans who are worried about climate change and want action to cut emissions hasn’t really budged. Even though climate change is a lower priority for voters than it used to be — number 24 out of 25 issues, according to data from the Yale program — that’s mainly because other issues have risen in importance. For liberal Democrats in particular, that includes the protection of democracy, the treatment of immigrants, and the disruption of government services. “It’s just that all these other issues have now leapfrogged above climate change as a voting issue priority,” Leiserowitz said.

Hertsgaard argues that there’s a huge audience out there waiting for more articles about life on a warming planet. Some 80 to 89 percent of people globally — and 74 percent in the U.S. — want their governments to take stronger action on climate change, according to surveys. Outlets around the world are leaning into climate coverage, gaining audiences and making money from it, he argued, pointing to The Guardian and France Télévisions, the French public broadcaster, which saw its ratings improve after incorporating climate change into its weather forecasts. “If you are a smart newsroom, you will recognize that this is a business opportunity, not just a journalistic duty,” Hertsgaard said. 

Still, experts said that the big-picture trends driving the decline in coverage of the climate will be tough to turn around in the near future, even as extreme weather continues to draw attention to the consequences of a warming planet. As long as Trump’s in office, there’s likely to continue to be intimidation of the media, climate hushing, and a steady stream of chaos in the news crowding out climate stories, Fisher said. 

Leiserowitz, though, is hopeful that the public won’t forget what they learned back when the mainstream media started covering the crisis in earnest. “Just because it’s not being talked about in the media,” he said, “doesn’t mean that it suddenly disappeared or it’s been wiped out of their memory banks.”

---