Climate Crisis Coverage Vanishes from American Media Despite Public Concern

Nearly 90% of people worldwide want more action on the climate crisis, with almost seven in ten willing to donate 1% of their income to help address it. In the United States, two-thirds of citizens report being at least somewhat worried about global warming.

Yet despite this widespread concern, Americans receive remarkably little information about a crisis that is reshaping the global economy, displacing populations, worsening extreme weather, and affecting nearly every aspect of daily life. According to a 2025 Yale Program on Climate Change Communication report, more than half of Americans say they encounter news about climate change only several times a year or less.

“If the media’s not reporting the issue of climate change, it’s out of sight and out of mind for people,” explained Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale program.

This information gap has grown more pronounced under an administration openly hostile to the scientific consensus on climate change. Donald Trump and his allies have advanced misleading narratives about green energy trade-offs, drawing media attention toward manufactured controversies rather than established facts.

“The Trump administration is playing reporters like a fiddle on the issue of trade-offs by bringing up red herrings and sending reporters down rabbit holes,” said Jael Holzman, a climate reporter at Heatmap News.

Among President Trump’s most notable misleading claims is that offshore wind projects are “driving the whales crazy” and causing marine mammal deaths. Scientific consensus contradicts this narrative, identifying vessel strikes and fishing-gear entanglements as the primary culprits. Nevertheless, many media outlets continue giving airtime to unsubstantiated concerns from politicians and community groups worried about whale populations.

A similar pattern emerged following the fire at California’s Moss Landing battery facility. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, a Trump appointee, used the incident to criticize New York’s battery storage infrastructure plans. Both Zeldin’s remarks and subsequent reporting often omitted crucial context—the incident likely stemmed from outdated technology not representative of newer battery-storage systems nationwide.

“The impact of the Trump administration on the coverage is intentional,” Holzman noted. “They don’t need everyone to deny the existence of climate change—they just need enough people to deny the importance of dealing with it now.”

Beyond spreading misinformation, the administration has made it harder for journalists to access essential data. Holzman described how a government dashboard she relied on to track environmental regulations “mysteriously went dark for more than a month.”

The team behind climate.gov, a federal clearinghouse for climate information, was dismissed this summer, with users redirected to a new site that has since gone without updates. The EPA has removed references to human activity as the main driver of climate change, instead emphasizing “natural processes” like volcanic eruptions and solar variations.

“Climate change has been scrubbed from government websites, they’ve taken down a number of major data sets, they are killing off programs at NASA,” said Leiserowitz, referencing the administration’s push to cancel the Orbiting Carbon Observatories, NASA missions that monitor greenhouse gas emissions.

However, Trump’s return to office isn’t the only factor in declining climate coverage. According to the Media and Climate Change Observatory, which monitors climate mentions across major American news outlets, coverage peaked in 2021 during discussions of the Biden administration’s landmark climate law before falling precipitously in subsequent years.

Traditional media’s long-term decline has exacerbated the problem. Since 2005, approximately 3,500 local newspapers have disappeared, according to Northwestern University research. Corporate consolidation and evaporating advertising revenue have forced budget cuts and layoffs, squeezing coverage of complex topics like climate science.

In 2023, CNBC laid off Cat Clifford, who helped establish the network’s climate desk. She later wrote that other layoffs had left the desk “fundamentally dismantled” with no dedicated staff covering climate issues.

Even when media outlets do cover climate change, stories must navigate an algorithm-driven information ecosystem that filters news through partisan lenses and amplifies misinformation. This environment rewards Trump’s provocative statements—what journalists call a “firehose of attention” strategy—often drowning out substantive climate coverage.

Climate change competes with “news and entertainment and sports and your kid saying they want ice cream, and everything else going on in our lives that’s demanding our attention,” Leiserowitz observed.

Despite these challenges, climate journalism has evolved significantly over recent decades. Sadie Babits, who filed her first environmental story in 2000, recalls when climate reporting required featuring both scientific voices and climate deniers for balance.

Today, Babits serves as senior supervising climate editor at NPR—a position that didn’t exist at the start of her career. Major outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press have established dedicated climate desks, while niche publications like Heatmap News, Canary Media, and The Cool Down have emerged in recent years.

“If people weren’t interested in these topics, then I wouldn’t have a job,” Holzman said. “I have readers so religiously interested in every word that I write that I have fans that come up to me in bars.”

Even as Congress cut federal support for NPR over allegations of liberal bias, Babits affirms the outlet remains committed to climate coverage: “We see this as a critical story of our time. We have not backed down from the kind of work that we would be doing in any other year.”