28 Percent of Fox News' Climate Coverage Was Accurate in 2013—A Huge Improvement

The most important factor motivating how climate change is perceived by the public is still media coverage. Personal observation—is it sweltering or snowing outside?—plays a role, as do previously held political convictions. But the way the media covers climate change probably goes the furthest in sculpting public perception of the issue. A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) details how well mainstream news outlets covered global warming last year, and it's unsurprising that Fox faired the worst—and considerably so.

Just 28 percent of its stories accurately reflected the science, compared with CNN's 70 percent accuracy rating and MSNBC's 92 percent truthfulness. The Guardian has a good breakdown of how the study was conducted, and its other findings. But there's another reason that the Fox finding is eyebrow-raising, apart from its beyond-flunking marks: It's a huge improvement on the year before.

A previous UCS study found that only seven percent of Fox News stories were scientifically accurate in 2012. That's less than one in every ten stories. The next year saw a considerable uptick in accuracy, mostly in the stories that aired on Bill O'Reilly's and Bret Baier's shows.

In 2007, Rupert Murdoch—who believes in climate change himself—promised that his networks' climate coverage would improve. But the years went by, and Fox remained the largest perpetrator of climate misinformation in the nation.

"While Fox News' climate coverage has improved over the past year, the network has a long way to go if its goal is to accurately inform its viewers," climatologist Dana Nuccitelli writes.

Despite public climate denial reaching record highs in 2013, and despite some truly unscientific ideas about climate change being spouted in the US Congress, there are some small signals in the noise that the conservative climate view may be inching towards reality. Fossil fuel companies are quietly acknowledging the looming threat of climate change, and many wrote the assumption that a price on carbon is inevitable into their long-term business models. Deeply conservative Texas is now a leader in wind power.

The myth of a "pause" in warming has been debunked, and global temperatures will continue to rise. Perhaps the climate denial crowd is running out of excuses, and perhaps in the face of evidence as insurmountable as was assembled in the latest IPCC report, Murdoch's feeble pro-climate mumblings are gaining ground.

Or perhaps it's a meaningless blip, not a trend, and the network will continue its abysmal habit of denying a crisis in the face of a truly remarkable, fact-checked body of science.