Although the climate crisis is considered by scientists as the most serious environmental emergency of our time, in the first four months of 2022, the topic does not seem to find a corresponding visibility in television information.
This is what emerges from some preliminary results of the study that Greenpeace Italy has commissioned from the Osservatorio di Pavia, a study that will continue throughout 2022 and that will become an annual report. The analysis examined from January to April 2022 all the prime-time editions of the news broadcast on Rai, Mediaset and La7, and a sample of six television broadcasts of information: Unomattina and Cartabianca for Rai, Mattino 5 and Quarta Repubblica for Mediaset, L’Aria che tira and Otto e mezzo for La7.
The results show that in the first four months of 2022, only 0.7% of the 14211 news stories of the 7 TV news examined explicitly addressed the climate crisis or cited it.
In the television broadcasts of information that are part of the analysed sample, the climate crisis was discussed in 24 episodes out of the 388 that were examined in the four months of the survey, equal to 6% of the total. The programme that is more concerned with the theme is Cartabianca (Rai), which addressed the issue in a third of the episodes broadcast, while Unomattina (Rai1) is the programme that talked about the climate crisis in the greatest number of episodes, equal to 12. At the bottom of the list are the two broadcasts of La7: L’aria che tira and Otto e mezzo, with agendas not interested in the issue.