Midterm Voters Say Climate Change Was Just as Important as Crime. But Crime Got 3X More Coverage.

It turns out media content isn't simply an organic expression of consumer demand.

When media critics have commented over the past few months about the media focus on crime, they’ve been told that this isn’t media generating a problem, but an organic response that voters care about. Setting aside the fact that, to a great extent, our media curates what “concerns” voters have in the first place, one would imagine that media coverage of important midterm issues would therefore track, roughly, with the issues voters say are important when they go to the polls. 

After all, this is the outcome-based, agency-free, non ideological, market-driven excuse people give for why our media reports so breathlessly and nonstop about the topic of crime. 

It’s useful, then, to compare the media coverage of two major and pressing issues, climate change and crime, with election day polls that told us which issues voters found important. An election day voter poll conducted by AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research for Fox News and the Associated Press showed that 9 percent of voters said the most important issue to them was climate change, and 8 percent said the most important issue to them was crime. Eighty percent of voters said they were, generically, concerned about crime and 63 percent said they were concerned about climate change. For the purposes of this column we will call this a tie: Climate change is the most important issue to more people, but more people have “concerns” about crime than about climate change. 

So, one would expect media coverage to reflect that voter concern. Alas, it does not. In an analysis of three influential mainstream media publications—The New York Times, CNN, and USA Today—using Google mentions in the three months leading up to the midterm election, we found that crime was mentioned, averaged across these outlets, over three times as much as climate change. The New York Times mentioned climate change 4,150 times and crime 8,080 times. CNN mentioned climate 1,140 times and crime 6,450 times. And USA Today mentioned climate change 1,420 times and crime 2,560 times. CNN was particularly egregious, with 466 percent more mentions of crime than climate change. The totals can be found here. Despite Fox News having a larger audience than CNN, we decided to omit partisan networks Fox News and MSNBC because, doing a qualitative survey, their mentions of climate change and crime were far likelier to be overtly editorial in nature and not indications they were discussing the topic as such. Both had far more mentions of crime than climate change, but given the qualitative differences, we thought it best to not include them.

Nor does this disparity include a qualitative analysis which would make the gap in urgency far greater. When crime is discussed, the vast majority of time the solution is presented as obvious and inevitable: more police staff, police funding, and longer sentences. When climate change is reported on, the problem is more abstract and the “solutions” far less clear. Everyone is just “concerned,” but there’s almost no political call to action beyond vague “targets.” No comparable call for the cessation of extracting fossil fuels, which climate scientists argue is essential to curbing the most catastrophic of scenarios. 

The disparity in coverage is especially glaring given that the COP27 United Nations climate talks took place from November 6 to 18 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt (this global forum, two days before the midterms, is why climate coverage was even as high as it was). These international negotiations, theoretically, would benefit from robust reporting on the proposals being discussed, the industries seeking influence, and the pledges being brought by world leaders. A UN “Emissions Gap Report” released October 27 found that governmental efforts to cut carbon emissions have been "woefully inadequate," and dramatic, transformational, society-wide action is needed to avert disaster for humanity. Surely, that raises the stakes—and urgency of media coverage—for the COP27 climate talks.

This isn’t to say, as I’ve noted elsewhere, that crime isn’t an urgent and serious issue. Murder rates in many major metropolitan areas have increased and polls show anxiety about crime is growing and potent—media-driven or not. But voters are not all Id: They have complex and nuanced views of crime and they, evidently, understand we face other existential crises that don’t show up on their nightly local news.