In 2025, corporate broadcast networks aired just eight hours of climate coverage across an entire year—a 35 percent drop from the year before—according to a new analysis by Media Matters for America. The decline came even as climate disasters intensified across the United States and federal climate policy entered a period of aggressive rollbacks. Climate justice appeared in only 2 percent of segments, fossil fuels in 8 percent, and White men accounted for more than half of all guests featured in climate coverage. The result is a public narrative that treats climate largely as a lifestyle segment or a one-off disaster story rather than the defining political and economic issue of our time, all while sidelining the expertise of women and frontline communities.

Broadcast television still reaches millions of viewers each night. When that platform shrinks its climate coverage, the implications extend far beyond journalism. They shape how the public understands risk, policy, and responsibility. If climate appears only when a wildfire spreads across the screen or a hurricane makes landfall, audiences are left without the context needed to connect those events to fossil fuel systems and the corporations benefiting from them, the political decisions that enable their expansion, and the communities living with the consequences long before disaster footage makes the evening news.

Movement Media and Intentional Changes in Climate Coverage

The contraction in coverage is not occurring in a vacuum. It is unfolding alongside structural changes inside major newsrooms that are reshaping editorial priorities. CBS—historically the leader in broadcast climate reporting—dismantled much of its climate reporting capacity in late 2025 after installing Bari Weiss as editor in chief. Weiss rose to prominence as a columnist at The New York Times before founding The Free Press, a subscription-based media platform that positions itself as a corrective to what it describes as ideological bias in mainstream journalism.

Read the full article about movement media's climate coverage by Shilpi Chhotray at Nonprofit Quarterly.