BILL PRESS (HOST): Media Matters issued a new report on how much attention the media has been paying to this important issue [of climate change]. Lisa Hymas here, director of climate and energy programs at Media Matters, joining us in studio. Lisa, good to see you.
LISA HYMAS (CLIMATE PROGRAM DIRECTOR, MEDIA MATTERS): Thanks for having me here.
PRESS: So, give us the gist. What was the executive 30-second summary of your report here?
HYMAS: Sure.
PRESS: Or you can even make it a minute or a minute and a half.
HYMAS: OK, thanks. We looked at coverage of climate change news on the broadcast TV networks -- so the nightly news shows and Sunday morning shows on ABC, NBC, CBS. We also looked at Fox's Sunday morning show. And basically we found they did not do a great job. They missed a lot of critical stories. Meanwhile, a lot of their climate coverage was just basically about what Trump said about climate change.
So, you think about last year -- it was a year of major weather disasters in the U.S. We had three devastating hurricanes, we had wildfires in California and other places that displaced so many people. Those are just the kinds of things that scientists are telling us climate change is going to bring more of.
But when the broadcast networks talked about those disasters, they didn't bring up climate change -- they brought it up very rarely. So they only talked about climate change in the context of the hurricanes twice -- all the networks combined, during all of 2017.
PRESS: Really, twice they made the connection.
PETER OGBURN (PRODUCER): Good grief.
HYMAS: Yeah, exactly. So they're just not telling people what's going on. I mean, climate change is not just something that's going to happen in the future to our grandkids, far away. It's something that's happening right now. It's bringing devastation to communities in the U.S. right now. And the media just isn't connecting the dots for folks.
