News Coverage Cues and Perceived Polarisation on Climate Change Issues in Germany

For the next session at ECREA 2024 I am once again in a session on polarisation, and we start with a double-header presentation by Quirin Ryffel and Nayla Fawzi. They begin with an overview of polarisation patterns in German – here, as in many other European countries, there is no simplistic left/right polarisation as there is in the US, but more usually polarisation on specific issues. One of these is environmental policy.

There is broad consensus on the science of climate change and the need for action in Germany; however, there are also strong perceptions of polarisation between groups who would like to do more or less on climate action, and between perceptions of the impact of climate action on personal freedoms. News media have a substantial role to play in shaping such perceptions of overall public opinion, of course, and this can affect people’s attitudes. Media coverage of polarisation can lead to exaggerated perceptions of polarisation (false polarisation), as well as to heightened affective polarisation between different groups.

This study explored these effects further, through a two-wave panel survey in June and August 2023 as well as a content analysis of German text and TV media coverage between those two waves. The latter identified polarisation or depolarisation cues in the coverage, and was then able to connect this with the self-reporting of media use in the surveys. This also distinguished between explicit mentions of polarisation and extreme opinions and implicit depictions of polarised conflicts and extreme behaviours by different groups. Exposure to such cues may increase affective polarisation and perceptions of polarisation.

The content analysis found that polarisation cues were present in some 37% of articles; explicit cues are rare, however (around 4% for both polarisation and extremity, around 1% for depolarisation and non-extremity). Implicit cues are more present: conflict cues in some 29%, extreme behaviour in 9%, and depolarisation cues in 3%. The distribution is uneven across outlets.

What effects might exposure to such cues have on audiences’ views of affective polarisation in both media coverage and society itself, then? The analysis showed no significant effects of media dosage on perceived affective polarisation in media coverage; perceptions of such affective polarisation in media coverage had a significant effect on perceptions of affective polarisation in society itself, however.

The lack of effect on perceptions of media coverage might be due to the short timespan or the limitations of the content dataset; images accompanying articles were not considered in the coding, for instance. Subsequent social media discussions of news content were also not considered here. Further, of course, audiences’ media use was self-reported and may not be accurate.

Moving on to the second study, the attention now shifts to false polarisation at the issue level. Actual polarisation may be assessed as the difference between actual issue positions of supporters and opponents of an issue; perceived polarisation is the difference between the two groups’ perceptions of the other side. False polarisation, then, is a measure of the difference between perceived and actual polarisation; research on such polarisation may also be linked with research on the overall opinion climate.

Survey results show these patterns very clearly for support for our opposition to specific climate measures; in the survey results, these vary substantially for each issue, however, and there is no consistent trend in the differences between actual and perceived polarisation across all measures. Connecting this with data on the media content encountered, the dose of polarisation cues in such media content shows negative effects for public, private, and tabloid media (false polarisation declines), and positive effects for left-of-centre outlets (false polarisation increases).

Lower false polarisation then occurs especially for audiences with very broad media repertoires, and this may be the main point here: the more broadly audiences inform themselves, the less they will falsely perceive polarisation to be greater than it actually is.