Post by Imke Hoppe

Does television still have the capacity to create shared public attention to climate change? In times of overlapping societal crisis, an increasingly fragmented and polarized digital media landscape, television retains a unique potential. Our study combines the analysis of the equivalent of 2.7 years of German TV programming (autumn 2022) with a nationally representative audience survey. We are happy to share that our findings are published today in Springer Nature / Nature Climate Change. #ClimateCommunication #MediaResearch #ScienceCommunication 💡 Findings 📺 Television still holds transformative potential. It remains as one of the few media spaces capable of creating broadly shared public attention to climate change, reaching mostly to the climate-engaged majority. 🎬 Television misses the power of storytelling. Around 80% of climate-related broadcast minutes appear in informational formats, while only ~20% are found in entertainment-oriented categories. ⚠️ Integrative potential remains underused. While television reaches the majority of engaged audiences, it often fails to make climate change accessible to climate-distant segments, especially beyond the core news-consuming publics. ⚖️ Unequal representation across diverse social groups  Uneven visibility of social groups (e.g. 34% female versus 66% male, n = 71,971 faces) limits television’s capacity to function as an inclusive democratic space for climate discourse. 🔄 Format innovation. To strengthen its role as a common communicative space, television needs more inclusive storytelling, broader representation, and formats beyond traditional news programming. 🔧 Methods 📺 Full programming of 20 major German TV broadcasters (public and private) captured ~1.5 million minutes of content within two months 🌍 Chose a high-pressure societal context (Ukraine war, energy crisis) 🤖 Combined large-scale automated speech-to-text detection with manual coding and cross-validated facial-recognition analysis to examine not only how often climate appears, but who is visible in the debate. 👥 Linked this content analysis to a nationally representative survey (n = 1,445) to understand different climate attitude segments On a personal note This team always made space for curiosity - for asking difficult questions, experimenting, and testing new ideas: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München: Felix Doerpmund, Matthias Garschagen, Elisabeth Hartmann and Johanna Listl; Universität Hamburg/Freie Universität Berlin: Irene Neverla; Fraunhofer IDMT: Christian Weigel, Alexander Loos, Uwe Kuehhirt, Dr. Jens Appell, and Stephanus Volke; Weizenbaum-Institut: Thomas Kox. Warm thanks to the MaLisa Stiftung with Maria Furtwängler and Johanna Langhof, and ARD, ZDF, Pro7Sat1, and RTL Deutschland for making the technical data collection possible, as well as to Elizabeth Prommer. A special thank you goes to our excellent reviewers, and to Andrés A. for his outstanding graphical expertise.