How broadcast TV networks covered climate change in 2025

Corporate broadcast networks again reduced climate coverage in 2025, marking the third year coverage has declined since the networks’ high-water mark of 23 hours of reporting in 2022. A Media Matters analysis found that ABC, CBS, and NBC aired a combined 8 hours and 25 minutes of climate coverage across 201 segments, a 35% decline from 2024.

This contraction occurred despite geographically widespread and disruptive climate impacts throughout the year, widening the gap between real-world climate risk and the information available to broadcast audiences.

Coverage continued to prioritize episodic disaster reporting over sustained attention to systemic drivers of climate change, fossil fuel accountability, scientific context, and the experiences of frontline and impacted communities. Climate mentions were most often tied to discrete events rather than incorporated into ongoing explanatory, accountability-driven, or policy-focused reporting.

The second Trump administration’s major federal climate rollbacks — which have direct implications for public health, environmental protection, and community vulnerability — repeatedly intersected with destructive climate events in 2025, but were only intermittently integrated into corporate broadcast climate segments, limiting viewers’ ability to connect climate impacts to governance and regulatory decisions.

At the same time, newsroom disruptions and leadership changes, particularly at CBS, compounded a multi-year decline in broadcast climate reporting and reshaped the media landscape entering 2026. These shifts reduced institutional capacity for sustained climate journalism at a moment when climate impacts are accelerating and federal climate policy is undergoing rapid and consequential change.