Hi everyone: This newsletter has been on hiatus while I spent the summer focusing on research and parenting a wonderful, active and exhausting toddler.
I’m back to teaching social media journalism this fall. With my graduate students prototyping newsletters, there is no time like the present to dust off my own. So, here’s a new edition.
As always, I would love to hear from you.
Late-Night on Climate Change
U.S. late-night shows teamed up to talk about climate change Wednesday as part of the Climate Group’s Climate Week NYC. Dubbed “Climate Night” by organizers, the collaboration was spearheaded by former “Daily Show” and “Patriot Act” showrunner Steve Bodow.
The evening of themed coverage included [links to clips]:
ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,”
Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,”
“Climate Night,” and along with it other Climate Week in-person and virtual events, was timed to coincide with the annual United Nations General Assembly in New York City, where climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic dominated the agenda.
For a ranking of the coverage, Grist organized a crew of five self-described young journalists to watch and rate the shows. Accordingly they reported the coordinated viewing effort was not without challenges:
“Attempting to organize a group of five young journalists — none of whom has a cable box in their home — to watch the live broadcasts of these shows as they aired was basically as complicated as negotiating the Paris Agreement. These programs are not intended to be viewed in real time by the streaming generations. If you are watching a television program as God intended, via cable box or satellite or antennae at its scheduled broadcast time, odds are that you are older.
That’s maybe not such a big problem in this case. The ideal target for climate awareness is those who know their way around a TV Guide, because that demographic is more likely to have merely tepid concern about climate change or none at all. And they also tend to vote, shop, and donate in greater numbers than the younger crowd. That cohort is hardly representative of those driving the climate activist movement — something that could also be said of our late-night hosts’ in-studio guests, who were overwhelmingly white.”
How Audiences Respond to Climate Humor
The theme of this newsletter is a research-informed dive into how to better communicate on climate change. So how do audiences respond to humor in messaging on climate change and scientific issues?
That’s a big question, with a growing body of scholarship. Here’s a rundown of several recent studies examining satire on climate change and audience responses to scientists doing comedy.
In a pre-print, Eddie Clarke and colleagues looked at how individuals across the political spectrum in the United States responded to a John Oliver “Last Week Tonight” clip addressing the scientific consensus on climate change. Conducting an experiment with a politically-balanced sample from Amazon Mechanical Turk, participants were exposed to either the climate change consensus clip or a non-political one. The researchers found that viewing the video highlighting the overwhelming scientific consensus on human-caused climate change did not affect the degree of political polarization in support, or lack thereof, for limiting greenhouse gas emissions.
However, they found that the viewing the climate change content did increase polarization on policies for adapting to climate impacts. They also found that among liberals, viewing the clip heightened one’s stated intention to engage in pro-environmental behaviors (e.g. voting for political candidates that support climate action). Thus, Clarke and colleagues suggest that viewing late-night shows talking about climate change could have what they term a “‘rally-the-base’ effect” for self-identified liberal viewers.
Using a sample of university students, Sara Yeo and colleagues tested responses to a clip of standup comedy by a scientist with or without audience laughter. They found that when the college student participants perceived more humor (e.g. the clip with a laugh track) in the content they were more likely to find the scientist likable and rated with a higher degree of expertise.
Lastly, Chris Skurka and colleagues studied how young adults in the United States respond to humor and indignation in late-night television using a segment about climate change from “Jimmy Kimmel Live!.” They write:
“In short, we found that a late-night host (in this study, Jimmy Kimmel) can be a persuasive science communicator under certain conditions. However, the use of humor maintained the partisan divide in perceptions of climate change risk.”
For more, I recommend you check out the work of Amy Bree Becker (Loyola University Maryland) and Ashley Anderson (Colorado State University).
And one more thing…
In climate journalism newsletter news, climate activist and author Bill McKibben moved over from The New Yorker to Substack earlier this month.
McKibben is part of a new effort to mobilize older demographics on climate change, called Third Act. As he puts it:
“Young people are now fully engaged and leading the way; we’re seeing remarkable activism in frontline and indigenous communities. But there’s a group that, I think, is not pulling its weight, and it’s a group I’m now a part of. Call us ‘experienced Americans’—the baby boomers and silent generations that make up a huge percentage of the population, own a remarkable share of its financial assets, and vote in large numbers.”
According to McKibben we are collectively, no matter our age, “between a rock and a hot place.” In the spirit of this newsletter edition’s theme, I believe it was pun intended.
As always, thanks for reading and take care! 💚