Climate Partisanship: The Discursive Logic of the Climate Change Divide on Cable News

Caleb Scoville, Tufts University
Andrew McCumber, Virginia Tech

The divide between Democrats’ and Republicans’ views on climate change policy is well documented, but social scientists have had less to say about how climate change is woven into the broader fabric of American partisanship. Drawing on the qualitative and computational analysis of two decades of climate change discourse on ideologically opposed cable news networks (MSNBC and Fox News), we show that the partisan significance of climate change cannot be reduced to disagreements about climate policy. It is often instead scaffolded onto the meanings of other issues and aspects of partisan identity. Partisan discussions of climate change with no policy content are especially common on Fox News and are strongly associated with the topic of terrorism on that network. The terrorism-climate discourse asserts that Democratic elites’ framing of climate change as a major security threat reflects a dangerous misallocation of fear, motivated by being ashamed of America. We argue that Fox News’s integration of climate politics into a more generic – and hostile – conception of “us” and “them” cannot be explained with prevailing conceptions of climate disinformation and offer climate partisanship as an alternative grounding concept.

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 Presented in Session 53. Energy, Climate Change, and the Immediacy of the Present