Media Matters searched transcripts in the Nexis and SnapStream databases for ABC’s Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and This Week; CBS’ Mornings, Saturday Morning, Sunday Morning, CBS Evening News, Weekend News, and Face the Nation; NBC’s Today, Sunday Today, NBC Nightly News, and Meet the Press; Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday; and PBS’ NewsHour for any of the terms and any derivations of the terms “climate,” “global warming,” “global heating,” “global temperatures,” “warmer planet,” “warming planet,” “planet warms,” “warmer globe,” “warming globe,” “globe warms,” “rising temperatures,” “hotter temperatures,” “green new deal,” “emissions,” “greenhouse gases,” or “net zero” from January 1 through December 31, 2023.
We included any segment when climate change was the stated topic of discussion, as well as news rundowns that included a substantial mention of climate change, which we defined as a paragraph or more of a news transcript or a block of uninterrupted speech by a host, anchor, or correspondent. We also included weather reports, which we defined as instances when climate change was mentioned in an extreme weather report by a meteorologist in front of a green screen. We also included instances of a guest mentioning climate change in a network correspondent segment if the context of the segment was clearly about a climate, energy, or environmental issue.
When counting guest appearances, we included network employees — including paid contributors and analysts — if they appeared as part of a roundtable discussion on a Sunday morning political show. We did not include teasers if they were for segments that aired later during the same program. This review does not include “person on the street” interviews, in which an unnamed person in a transcript spoke briefly as a guest; however, in previous iterations of this study, we did include “person on the street” interviewees as guests.
We timed identified segments using the Snapstream or Kinetiq video databases, or YouTube if a network posted the segment to that website.
We rounded all times to the nearest minute and all percentages to the nearest whole number. To determine the total program time, we averaged running time without commercials for a sample of each program