CNN Is More Focused On Running Fossil Fuel Ads Than It Is On Covering Major Climate Stories | ThinkProgress

CREDIT: AP Photo/Carlos Osorio

Moderator Anderson Cooper, of CNN, looks on before a Democratic presidential primary debate at the University of Michigan-Flint, Sunday, March 6, 2016, in Flint, Mich.

If you tuned into CNN earlier this year, when NASA And NOAA announced that 2015 was the hottest year on record, you weren’t likely to see much coverage of that announcement. In fact, you were more likely to see an ad for the fossil fuel industry than a news story on how fossil fuels are driving the planet’s warming, according to a new report.

The report, released Monday by Media Matters, looked at CNN’s coverage in the one-week periods following the news that 2015 set the record for the world’s hottest year (January 20-26) and that February 2016 was the hottest February in 137 years of recordkeeping (March 17-23). It found that CNN spent nearly five times as much time airing fossil fuel industry advertisements in these two week-long periods than it did airing coverage of climate change and the recent records. The network spent 23.5 minutes on ads from the American Petroleum Institute, compared to five minutes spent on news coverage on climate change.

CREDIT: media matters

CNN spent less than one minute on coverage of January’s hottest year announcement, but it spent 13.5 minutes in the morning, afternoon, and evening airing fossil fuel industry ads. Then, following the February announcement, CNN spent four minutes on climate-related coverage and 10 minutes airing fossil fuel ads. And this coverage didn’t always mention climate change — “on March 18, CNN anchors Christine Romans and John Berman delivered nearly-identical reports on February’s ‘astounding’ temperature record during the 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. editions of Early Start, respectively, but neither explicitly mentioned climate change or the role fossil fuel pollution and other human activities play in driving climate change,” the report notes.

In fact, according to the report, only one segment on the unusually high temperatures mentioned climate change. CNN didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.

CNN has been criticized before for not spending enough time on climate coverage. In December, moderators failed to bring up climate change in a CNN Republican candidate debate that focused on national security — even though climate change has been recognized as a security threat by the Pentagon. In 2014, CNN President Jeff Zucker said that there was a “tremendous amount of lack of interest” in CNN’s climate coverage, and that the network hadn’t “figured out how to engage the audience in that story in a meaningful way.” However, as ThinkProgress noted at the time, CNN’s struggles to get audiences to care about climate coverage may have stemmed from the fact that the network tended to host debates over the issue, bringing on a guest like Bill Nye to debate a more conservative guest or host over whether climate change exists. This presents the issue — which the vast majority of climate scientists agree is happening and is caused by humans — as a false debate.

It’s not clear whether CNN has found better ways of engaging its audience on climate since 2014, but the Media Matters report makes clear that the network could be spending more time on climate coverage. CNN’s not the only one, though: a Media Matters report earlier this year found that ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, covered climate change 5 percent less in their nightly and Sunday news programs last year than they did in 2014.