‘A wake-up call’: The surge, change and challenges of climate coverage across U.S. media

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in August 2005, the storm was a breaking news catastrophe, not a climate story. More than 1,800 people were killed and entire neighborhoods were submerged, yet the national conversation focused on government failures and the scale of human suffering, with little coverage on what rising seas or warming waters might mean for future storms.

At the time, climate coverage existed but was scattered. Reporters who worked those beats say conversations about the connections between extreme weather and global warming were limited — and often sidelined in daily news coverage.

In the years since, climate journalism has expanded rapidly at both the national and local levels. A 2024 study found that between 2011 and 2022, climate change coverage rose 144% at state and local outlets, and nearly tripled — up 299% — at what the study labeled “elite” national outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and USA Today.

Climate desks in newsrooms were introduced during that time, too. After shuttering its environment desk in 2013, The New York Times launched its climate desk in 2017. The Washington Post introduced its climate desk in 2018. The Associated Press and NPR both began their climate desks in 2022. The multi-publication consortium Climate Desk, a national desk with about 16 partners that contribute climate related stories including The Guardian, Slate and Inside Climate News, started in 2010. 

NPR Miami Correspondent Greg Allen, who has been a reporter for over 40 years and covered Katrina on the frontlines of the storm for NPR, said even though the U.S. had experienced hurricanes in the past, at the time Katrina hit, it was one of the first storms that got peoples’ attention.

“Katrina was a wake-up call,” he said. “And since then, we’ve had a number of wake-up calls.”

There was Hurricane Ida in 2021, which made landfall in Louisiana; Hurricane Ian hit Florida and the Carolinas in 2022. Then there was Hurricane Helene in North Carolina last September, the deadliest hurricane to hit the U.S. since Katrina. And on July 4, the flash flood in Texas took an estimated 138 lives — it was the deadliest of its kind in the country since 1976. 

“I kind of see Katrina as being the inflection point where it reminded you that it’s not just weather — it can change the entire country’s direction,” Allen said, who also has been reporting on the Texas floods this summer.  

Allen said he doesn’t recall much focus on climate change in reporting at the time Katrina hit, but there were some local and national outlets who used that angle. 

Despite Katrina capturing America’s attention as a tragedy — with people still grappling with its devastation today — experts and climate reporters say it likely wasn’t the catalyst for the surge in climate change coverage. 

David G. Victor, author of a June 2024 study on elite and non-elite climate coverage and professor and director of innovation and public policy at the University of California San Diego, said he thinks “if we rewound the tape in history” and didn’t have Katrina or Hurricane Rita a month later, “we’d be more or less in the same place.” 

“Those ended up being the most extreme weather-related events in the advanced industrialized countries and so people tend to link them, but I think that’s correlation, not causation,” Victor said.

Mark Schleifstein, who spent over 40 years at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans and won a Pulitzer Prize for his Katrina coverage in 2006, said before Katrina happened, climate change and global warming would be an aside in his stories by mentioning that they’d likely be causing changes in the future. 

“In most cases, my stories were aimed at what’s causing land loss in Louisiana at the time, climate change was not the key element, and it wasn’t the key element that was considered in state plans, or anything else at that time,” Schleifstein said. “Katrina really was a major change in the way that everybody looked at it, even though, in New Orleans, Katrina was not a climate change event.”

Climate journalist Andrew Revkin, who spent nearly 22 years at The New York Times and now publishes a Substack called “Sustain What,” also said Katrina wasn’t a pivotal landmark for climate change reporting, but was a “multi-dimensional shift” in subsequent years that drove coverage shifts. 

“If anything, what I would say is a lot of my colleagues in the media covering climate were so caught up in the climate change part of the [Katrina] story that they neglected to dive deep on the issue of what makes a community at risk from climate hazards,” Revkin said. 

‘Don’t we have to tell both sides?’

In a polarized world where climate change has long been politicized, reporters and analysts said there are challenges that come with reporting on the topic. 

When Julie Grant, managing editor and reporter at Pittsburgh-based Allegheny Front, was a reporter at a radio station in the early 2000s, she said the news director would ask, “When we talk about climate change, don’t we have to tell both sides?”

“You know how you have to balance your story and say, ‘Some people believe this is happening,’ and I just remember having that debate, like, ‘No, we shouldn’t say that,’” Grant recalled. 

The attempt to find balance can create bias, said Lucy McAllister, assistant professor of sustainability & environmental studies, who also co-authored a 2021 study about print media coverage of climate change over the past three decades.

“You still see this prevalent on certain TV channels where you’ll have a climate change scientist and then a climate change denier or skeptic, and so this can amplify uncertainty and encourage political action,” she explained. “And it’s problematic because it creates a biased account of climate change, because it implies that the scientific community is split down the middle.”

Victor agreed that journalism’s reliance on balance can create a bias.

He said he doesn’t think balance means interviewing unqualified sources and quoting misinformation under the guise of covering all sides. “A journalist, actually, I believe, has an obligation to not just present all views as if all views are equally meritorious,” Victor said.

Following Katrina, the topics of climate and climate change became more politicized — in 2009 there was Climategate, when emails from a university’s research unit were hacked by climate change deniers claiming scientists manipulated data to fake global warming; in the same year the cap-and-trade bill addressed the changing climate and restricted greenhouse gas emissions. Revkin cited both events as driving an increase in reporting. 

Part of the solution for the balance bias can come from journalists utilizing resources like the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, a United Nations group, said Revkin and McAllister.

Though she hasn’t done any studies on the solutions specifically, McAllister, who has long analyzed media coverage of climate change, said while she recognizes the complexity of all the topics journalists may cover, communicating the complexity of climate change to general audiences is a challenge.

“I think that the specialization and the expertise required is significant on this topic,” she said. “So I think that if the resources are there to have dedicated journalists who have knowledge on this area, it is especially important for this topic.”

If reporters can begin with the risk formulate of “risk equals the hazard, fire, flood, whatever, times exposure, how many people, how much stuff, and factoring in vulnerability,” Revkin said, “it’s a way to strip away all the narrative tussles that are underway to try to grab your attention.”

“If we start with the phrase ‘climate risk’ as we look at something that happens in the world, that changes everything in a constructive way, because I learned from all my disaster coverage, including earthquakes and the like, how disaster scholars and disaster experts think, and they always start with what I described earlier,” Revkin explained, which is the risk formula.

Revkin said it’s also important for reporters to focus on what readers care about in the face of a disaster, which is usually telling what happened. 

“The best climate coverage was just like minded reporters, and you needed an editor who got excited about a particular framing for a series or a project, with or without a [climate] desk,” Revkin said. “And once you have a desk though, then it’s hungry for that thing called climate reporting.”

Allie Miller (they/them) is a freelance journalist based in the Pittsburgh area covering health, education and LGBTQIA+ stories. Allie is a 2024 graduate from Saint Joseph’s University, where they earned a B.A. in English, Writing & Journalism, and a B.A. in Spanish.