Exploring the Climate Crisis: Economic Inequality Nexus in the U.S. American Media Landscape

The unfolding climate crisis is deeply interwoven with economic inequality in multiple ways. This study investigates the coverage of the intersection between the climate crisis and economic inequality in the US news-media. It asks whether coverage of this nexus is different between media outlets, depending on their respective political leanings, ownership structures or journalistic styles. To do so, a unique corpus of news content from 2014 to 2020, from 13 different American media outlets, is assembled. Using structural topic model (STM) and critical discourse analysis, the effects of political leaning and ownership covariates are analyzed. As a comparison, a second STM model is built from another data set: this corpus is taken from two alternative news outlets, selected for their explicitly ‘progressive’ and more climate-crisis focused journalistic style. Results show a dominance of certain groups of actors in media discourse; the prevalence of market and technology-centric solutions; similar skews between economically aligned ownership groups; and conspicuous omissions of topics related to historical responsibility and shared burden. These findings are discussed through a critical political economy lens drawing on the Imperial Mode of Living concept and political economy of communication approaches. This article reveals that the American mainstream media system perpetuates long-standing asymmetries both on a global and domestic scale, effectively serving the interests of powerful actors. It is an instrument through which consensus around a particular mode of living is created, consciously or not. Consequently, the media system creates and diffuses a particular understanding of the intersection of climate crisis and economic inequality.