Evlondo Cooper is a senior writer with the climate and energy program at Media Matters. He’s been monitoring and analyzing media climate coverage for nearly a decade. Covering Climate Now spoke recently with Cooper about his new report on broadcast news coverage of July heatwaves and how not mentioning climate is the continuation of a “troubling” pattern, how advances in attribution science makes it easy to mention climate change in extreme weather reporting, and how public demand for climate context is outpacing what the press is offering. Check out all of Cooper’s analysis at Media Matters here.
What inspired you to do the study on how the networks covered this summer’s heatwaves?
We saw three major heat events in rapid succession and noticed that the networks gave each one substantial attention. But we wanted to know whether they’d go a step further and explain the larger pattern behind these events, which is global warming, or whether they would continue to present each event as kind of an isolated, siloed weather event.
The coverage itself repeatedly described the heat as historic or record breaking.
What’d you find?
We looked at segments on ABC, CBS, and NBC’s major morning and evening news programs from June 29 through July 26 that focused on the three major heat events, and checked whether they mentioned climate change or global warming.
Out of the 194 segments we identified, none mentioned climate change.
Most were weathercasts or forecasts that told people where the heat was headed, how high temperatures could go, and what they needed to know during these events. But they missed bridging between that day-of information that people needed and the larger pattern explaining why they were experiencing these three major heat events in rapid succession.
Were you surprised by the lack of climate coverage?
The broader pattern was familiar, but zero mentions across 194 segments was still surprising. We’ve seen this in other extreme weather studies we’ve done, that climate silence can coexist with extensive coverage.
They never do a great job — even in 2024, the first major heatwave event, we saw seven out of 43 broadcast segment segments make the climate connection. In 2025, the June 2025 heat dome, only three of 83 did so, all on CBS. So, we’re seeing an unfortunate trend of moving from limited attribution to none at all. It’s troubling.
Talk about why it’s important that journalists make this connection in extreme weather reporting?
Journalists need to communicate the climate context to ensure that people are being consistently informed about how global warming is impacting their lives. The science has shown that human-caused climate change is making extreme heat more frequent and intense.
Attribution science has made climate change’s impact on these events especially concrete. Climate Central found that warming made temperatures during the first two heatwaves at least three times more likely. During the late July event, warming made the extreme temperatures at least five times more likely. World Weather Attribution found that the humid heat across the Fourth of July weekend would have been “virtually impossible” in a pre-Industrial climate.
What’s been the reaction to your report?
It was shared decently across social media, and I think people are alarmed by it. I’ve noticed that folks presume that people are hearing a lot about climate and global warming.
But when you look at what the public at large is learning, you still see tremendous gaps in climate understanding — including little understanding of solutions and attribution, and how the fossil industry is driving much of the harm. But yeah, people were also shocked and surprised that the coverage is this bad in 2026.
Over the nine years you’ve been working on this beat, what trends have you noticed?
Climate coverage improved substantially in 2021 and 2022, when networks invested in dedicated climate correspondence. They gave more attention to the science, policy, and impacts. Organizations like Covering Climate Now and others were working to improve climate journalism and they were a big part of that progress, especially through training and newsroom collaborations and reporting resources and helping push sustained calls for strong editorial commitments. But much of that progress has since eroded.
In 2023, the broadcast networks devoted about 1,000 minutes to climate coverage. That fell to 765 minutes in 2024, and roughly 500 minutes in 2025. We’re also seeing climate context disappear from stories about events and policies directly shaped by the climate crisis.
CCNow has also discussed this phenomenon of climate hushing. Political institutional actors are speaking less about climate change because they regard the silence as strategically useful. The broadcast retreat is distinct from that in one way, but it’s contributing to the same information environment in which the science is becoming more urgent every day, while the subject itself is becoming less visible in public discourse.
Although our work in this particular study focused on extreme weather, climate change is the background of a number of events, ranging from the economy to housing to national security to foreign policy. When newsrooms cover these subjects every day, climate belongs in the reporting whenever it helps explain the story. This siloing is part of what Media Matters and my work and a lot of other people’s work is trying to break down. Climate is an explanatory factor in a range of stories. It’s just being limited, even when its impacts are being covered in extreme weather, to this very small niche group of stories.
In this analysis you note that of the three major TV networks, CBS was doing the best job last year. Do you have any insight into what’s going on now that editorial leadership has changed?
After the editorial change in October 2025, coverage dropped precipitously that month compared to October 2024. Since then, they’ve laid off their last dedicated climate reporter.
CBS was the hands-down leader in quality and quantity of climate coverage before October 2025. I don’t think they’re going to be that standard bearer in 2026. And I think we’re going to see a big retrenchment in their climate coverage. It’s a huge loss when they were kind of carrying the load in many ways for their other broadcasting networks.
It’s very harmful for the public [in terms of being] informed about climate change and also solutions and fossil fuel greenwashing. They covered a range of issues that you don’t see on other networks. It’s been a great loss to climate information and climate discourse.
Let’s try to end on a positive note. What will help journalists do better?
CCNow’s been one of the great organizations to come around in the last few years. You make a big impact. You all have really helped translate the demand for better journalism into practical reporting skills. Your work has helped journalists recognize climate angles across beats and understand attribution science and communicate the connection clearly to folks. Journalists don’t have to do a climate documentary or a whole climate segment to make coverage better. It could be one line in a weathercast, one line in a segment. Of course, people need more explanatory coverage than that. But just repeating that basic connection is important.
Here at Media Matters, we have a strong role in keeping count and helping measure and analyze how consistently news organizations are applying those practices. Unfortunately, recently, journalists had 194 opportunities to briefly provide that climate context recently, and they didn’t use them.
Public demand is outpacing what the networks are actually producing. You know, they can blame this lack of climate connection on a lot of different reasons, but polls show — across the ideological divide, even — that more and more people are concerned about extreme weather. More and more people want solutions to the climate crisis. So, I think, if these networks and these broadcast networks want to stay in touch with their own viewers, they need to report on climate change more. I think it’s going to become a demand. It’s going to be increasingly hard for them to ignore.
Encouraging local journalists to create a larger volume of climate reporting could help offset some frustration with the lack of national discourse. And hopefully that will make more people want to do more climate journalism. It’s my hope.