Presenter(s): Morgan Krakow
Faculty Mentor(s): Nicole Dahmen
Poster 112
Session: Social Sciences & Humanities
When President Trump makes statements about global climate change that lack context or scientific facts, journalists must decide how to refute and better contextualize such claims. Often, Twitter is the medium where President Trump makes these statements, placing journalists in a precarious moment — reporting on such informal presidential communication while accurately portraying issues of climate change. This research investigates how reporters grappled with responsibly covering the nexus of two emergent and critical issues: a president who touted often inaccurate information on Twitter, and the consequences of a rapidly changing climate. Using a textual analysis, stories from 3 large American newspapers that quoted at least one climate change related tweet by the president since his initial candidacy were categorized by tweet. The articles were then coded based on how the tweets were used as a journalistic tool. The coding revealed that there are many reporting styles to deal with the President’s tweets about climate change. The results demonstrated that the way the tweets were used depended primarily on the context, newspaper section and timing of the story that was published. Sometimes, the tweets provided context in a longform piece about President Trump’s overall views on the climate. Other times, the tweets were quoted as breaking news without any sort of in-article fact checking. Further, some reports used the inaccurate information as the focus of the story itself. Overall, the research showed that there is no standard manner of reporting on President Trump’s tweets about climate change.