This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Fueled by record-breaking drought and unusually high temperatures, Canada's 2023 wildfire season was the worst in the country's history, with more than 15 million hectares (37 million acres) charred. Smoke blanketed the eastern seaboard, with health alerts keeping people indoors as skies turned an eerie orange.
The fires were voted the Canadian Press news story of the year. The severity of the fires also shifted how they were covered by mainstream media. A new Concordia study of Canadian and U.S. media coverage found that leading broadsheet and tabloid outlets were increasingly likely to mention climate change in their stories and make explicit connections between the wildfires and climate change.
This change in coverage may be the beginning of a long-term realignment of the discussion around climate change in the media, says Amélie Daoust-Boisvert, the study's corresponding author and an associate professor in the Department of Journalism. Brianna Losinger Ross, a Ph.D. candidate in political science, is a co-author. The study was published in the journal Journalism Practice.
"We were somewhat surprised at the level of climate mentions and connections that we observed because the levels found in previous studies tended to be quite low, usually from 2% to around 15%," says Daoust-Boisvert. "We were less surprised to find that there was a gap between legacy broadsheets and tabloids, but even they were not entirely silent on climate change." The researchers analyzed almost 2,000 stories published between May and December 2023 by six Canadian and U.S. news organizations: The Globe and Mail, Le Devoir, Le Journal de Montréal, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The New York Post. The sample included English- and French-language coverage, broadsheet and tabloid media, and news and opinion stories.
To conduct the analysis, the researchers combined automated text mining with human coding. They then manually reviewed the relevant stories to determine whether the coverage connected the wildfires to climate change. This distinction proved important: Keyword searches alone could identify climate-related terms (for example, "spreading like wildfire") without establishing a connection to the fires, leading to false positives.
The researchers found that the likelihood of making a climate connection varied most strongly according to the newsroom and whether a story was news or opinion. Language, country and whether a publication was a tabloid or broadsheet had smaller effects. Nearly 40% of all stories mentioned climate change, while more than 30% explicitly connected the wildfires to climate change.
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