ABC, CBS, and NBC aired a combined 8 hours and 25 minutes of climate coverage across 201 segments, a 35% decline from 2024, according to a new Media Matters analysis.
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While global temperatures continued to rise and extreme weather events wreaked havoc around the world in 2025, coverage of the climate crisis on major US broadcast networks decreased for the third year in a row.
American corporate broadcast networks ABC, CBS, and NBC aired a combined 8 hours and 25 minutes of climate coverage across 201 segments in 2025, according to a transcript analysis of the networks’ morning, evening, and weekend shows by liberal watchdog Media Matters. This represents a 35% decline from the year prior, and a significant decrease from the 23 hours of reporting the networks collectively achieved in 2022.
CBS accounted for 48% of total broadcast minutes in 2025, followed by NBC at 39% and ABC at just 13%. The analysis also revealed that most climate mentions were tied to single events such as the Los Angeles wildfires in January or October’s Hurricane Melissa, rather than the root causes of the crisis – fossil fuels – or its long-term, systemic impacts on global communities.
Last month, veteran NBC meteorologist Chase Cain resigned from his position. In an interview with HEATED, Cain said he had to constantly fight to get important climate stories on air. “It just really got to that point where I was just kind of exhausted by the sales, by the constant trying to explain and remind, like, hey, this is important. Please run this story,” Cain said. “It just wore on me after a while.”
Trump’s Climate Actions Underreported
Since taking office in January 2025, US President Donald Trump has altered the nation’s role in the global fight against climate change, a crisis he himself has dismissed as a “con job”. But the consequentiality of the administration’s actions, from policy rollbacks and funding cuts to new regulations favoring planet-warming fossil fuels, went largely underreported, the analysis also found.
In all, the three major US networks referenced federal climate actions in just 15% of their total climate coverage. This is part of a longer trend of US broadcast networks consistently underreporting federal climate policy, according to Media Matters. In 2024, despite significant policy implementation by the Biden administration, the same networks mentioned federal climate initiatives in just 6% of climate segments.
Public Broadcasting Service’s (PBS) NewsHour, in contrast, was singled out in the analysis for its “sustained and substantive attention to Trump administration climate and environmental actions in 2025.” The daily evening TV news program aired 87 climate segments last year, 39% of which referenced federal climate actions.
Global Trend
Stories of climate justice and fossil fuel accountability represented just 2% and 8% of the commercial networks’ climate coverage, with voices of affected communities and first responders consistently underrepresented across the board.
The analysis, published earlier this month, comes as new research warns that extreme heat is increasingly making everyday life physically unsafe in many parts of the world.
Globally, climate coverage in media was also down 14% in 2025 compared to the year prior. According to the Media and Climate Change Observatory, last year’s coverage ranked just 10th in the past 22 years of tracking global coverage of climate change or global warming.
More on the topic: Media Shied Away From Climate Coverage in 2025 Despite Increased Reader Interest
Featured image: Adam Fagen/Flickr.
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