On the first anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, CNN White House correspondent Arlette Saenz introduced a segment on the August 16, 2023, edition of Inside Politics with Dana Bash by noting, “Many American voters are either skeptical or simply unaware of some of the benefits of that historic climate, tax, and health care legislation that Biden signed into law one year ago.” Saenz cited a joint survey by The Washington Post and University of Maryland that found seven in 10 Americans had heard little or nothing about the IRA, and the majority of those polled also said that they were “in the dark about the climate incentives within the legislation.”

The next day, guest anchor Ali Vitali on MSNBC’s Way Too Early with Jonathan Lemire pointed out that “most Americans are only aware of inflation, not the Inflation Reduction Act,” further underscoring how little the public knows about this legislative achievement.

More recent polling by the climate change communication programs at Yale and George Mason University found that awareness has not improved much in the legislation’s second year. “Most registered voters have not heard much about the Inflation Reduction Act,” their report concluded, adding that “about four in ten registered voters (39%) have heard ‘nothing at all’ about the IRA.” Notably, the survey found that when respondents read a short description of the Inflation Reduction Act, 74% of voters said they support it.

The Wall Street Journal made a similar point in an April 9 piece arguing that “President Biden has done more to address climate change than any of his predecessors. So far, voters don’t seem to care.” The article illustrated that voters don’t know about the Inflation Reduction Act or how its climate spending is boosting the economy.

Right-wing media attacked the Inflation Reduction Act and spread misinformation about the legislation even before it passed. Fox News’ early coverage of the IRA included attempts to falsely brand the policy as the Green New Deal, a proposal the network has spent years demonizing as a “totalitarian” “takeover” of government that would ban Americans from enjoying air travel and cheeseburgers.

Over the two-year period since the Inflation Reduction Act became law, Fox News has accounted for 47% of all mentions of the IRA on cable news. During peak coverage when the legislation passed in August 2022 through that October, Fox dominated mentions of both the IRA in general (56%) and the climate and energy provisions within it (53%).

As coverage spiked again at the one-year anniversary, Fox News continued to dominate mentions of the IRA, referring to it as the Green New Deal while disparaging its climate provisions.

On the network’s top-rated program The Five, for example, co-host Katie Pavlich characterized the legislation as a “handout to these green climate change projects which are completely corrupt and not environmentally friendly.” Fox host Laura Ingraham mocked IRA funding for “tree equity” initiatives in American cities – communities without sufficient canopy cover can reach temperatures up to 10 degrees higher than those that do, and one proven solution is to plant more trees in those neighborhoods. It was not the first time the Fox host has taken jabs at this common sense policy proposal, which is associated with improving health and reducing crime in communities disproportionately impacted by the urban heat island effect.

On September 4, 2023, Fox & Friends hosted Chuck Devore of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a Project 2025 partner organization, who attacked the Biden administration for connecting the Inflation Reduction Act climate policies to climate-fueled extreme weather events.

“I think you are seeing two things with this constant fearmongering over the climate crisis,” Devore said. “The first thing you are seeing is trying to drum up fear to get people to embrace a very unpopular policy. Policies that will make electricity more expensive, that will make gasoline more expensive, that will put fuel on Biden’s inflation fire.”

In the two years since the law passed, CNN mentioned the Inflation Reduction Act 58% less than Fox, and MSNBC referenced the legislation 29% less than Fox — combined, CNN and MSNBC mentioned climate in just 18% of their peak coverage of the IRA. This lag in coverage continues a problematic trend of Fox News dominating and shaping coverage of climate policies on cable news around right-wing talking points.

But even while the coverage was lacking, both CNN and MSNBC amplified some of the more positive narratives around the Inflation Reduction Act.

During the June 4 edition of All In with Chris Hayes, the MSNBC host used data about the current clean energy boom which was spurred on by the Inflation Reduction Act to illustrate the success of the legislation.

“We have seen the most seismic transformation in our production of energy since the dawn of the industrial revolution, when we started using fossil fuels at scale,” Hayes said. “That transformation has been spurred in no small part by President Joe Biden’s landmark legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act. The biggest climate investment in U.S. history. In just one year, private companies announced over $110 billion in clean energy manufacturing investments.”

On the August 13, 2023, edition of Inside with Jen Psaki, the MSNBC host and former Biden White House press secretary discussed specific members of Congress who publicly railed against the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and then touted the economic benefits that the climate spending brought to their districts — including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who posted in August 2022 that the IRA was an “America Last disaster.”

“But in April, Greene tweeted favorably about the expansion of the solar company Qcells and the jobs it would create in her district,” Psaki explained, adding, "Here’s the thing … Qcells specifically attributed the new investments to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.”

On the March 23 edition of MSNBC’s Velshi, climate scientist Michael Mann discussed the role of new tailpipe regulations and the IRA in the broader effort to decarbonize the power sector. Mann pointed out that “as part of a more comprehensive strategy on the part of this administration, the Inflation Reduction Act — those provisions have the potential to decrease carbon emissions by almost 40% by 2030.”

Suggesting that combining the IRA’s climate and energy measures with a focus on electrifying the transportation industry “really does offer the hope of meeting that obligation to lower carbon emissions 50% by 2030,” Mann added: “If we can do that, we maintain the sort of leadership that will bring other countries to the table and allow us to meet the larger challenge of lowering carbon emissions enough globally to avoid, again, catastrophic levels of warming.”

Media Matters searched transcripts in the Kinetiq video database for all original programming on CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC for the term “Inflation Reduction Act” from August 16, 2022, when President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law, through August 16, 2024. We considered each instance of the term as a single mention.

Media Matters also searched transcripts in the Kinetiq video database for all original programming on CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC for either of the terms “climate” or “energy” within close proximity of the term “Inflation Reduction Act” from August 16, 2022, through October 31, 2022 — when coverage of the legislation was at its peak — and from August 16, 2023, through October 31, 2023 — to measure coverage in the same time period a year later — to determine whether the climate and energy provisions in the legislation were also mentioned in the coverage. We considered each instance of either combination of the terms as a single mention.