TV News Did More Stories on Queen Elizabeth II in the Past 2 Weeks Than on Climate Change in the Past 2 Years
A survey of CNN, CBS News, NBC News, and ABC News finds 425 individual stories about Queen Elizabeth II’s death since Sept 7—and 331 total stories on Climate Change since Sept 2020.
A LexisNexis survey of coverage on CNN, CBS News, NBC News, and ABC News shows that American television news has exhaustively covered the death of the long-reigning British figurehead Queen Elizabeth II in the past two weeks. Between September 7, when rumors of her death first surfaced, and September 21, these outlets together ran a total of 425 segments. CNN did 270 segments on her death, ABC News did 55, NBC News did 42, and CBS News did 58.
By comparison, from September 7, 2020 to September 7, 2022—a period of two years—these same outlets ran a total of 331 segments on climate change. CNN did 184 segments, ABC News did 48, NBC News did 31, and CBS News did 68. CBS News was the only news network to run more climate stories in two years than stories of the Queen’s passing over the past two weeks, with 68 compared to 58. The results of the survey can be seen here.
Climate Change, assuming one believes the overwhelming scientific consensus, is the greatest existential threat to human survival. Its effects have manifested this year with shocking images and high death tolls. A scorching heat wave in India and Pakistan in March and April affected one out of every eight people on Earth, hitting well before the usual summer heat season, resulting in the accelerated melting of mountain glaciers, flash floods, and at least 90 deaths. Europe suffered its hottest summer ever recorded, resulting in crop failures, droughts, and wildfires. “Officials have attributed thousands of deaths to the long stretches of oppressively hot weather,” The Washington Post reports.
Meanwhile, the passing of a monarch in Britain, while certainly worthy of notice given how long her tenure was, has little impact on human survival. There could possibly be some accelerated breakaways from the commonwealth, and some people got a bit sad. But, ultimately, the queen’s death has comparatively little objective news value.
Our survey used headline mentions as proxies for story topic, so our analysis is likely a significant undercount, because we did not measure the total length of the coverage of the two topics. Since CNN and the major network news shows like ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Today Show covered the queen’s death and its surrounding public events for several hours at a time, it’s likely that the totality of coverage is far greater than our analysis shows.
A Column analysis from June looked at two weeks of coverage from April 15 to 29, when the 2022 heat wave in India and Pakistan was at its most acute and newsworthy. It found that the story was ignored entirely by CNN’s primetime news programs: The Lead with Jake Tapper, The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper 360°, NBC News (Today, Nightly News with Lester Holt, and Meet the Press), CBS News (Evening News, Sunday Morning News, and CBS Mornings), and ABC News (Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and This Week With George Stephanopoulos).
These same shows, however, did find time a few weeks later to run 33 stories on Queen Elizabeth II’s Jubilee celebrating her being the figurehead of Britain for 70 years.
Obviously, there is organic demand for royalty spectacle from the American public when it comes to editorial decisions, and a need for ratings has bearing on what media outlets choose to care about or not care about. But simply blaming consumer demand is the ultimate cop out. Interest in these spectacles is reinforced and shaped by editorial priorities for the past 70 years that have obsessed over every detail of the British monarchy, a focus that then reinforces public interest, until we end with a feedback loop of goopy embarrassment.
NBC News flew its Nightly News crew out to London to report live there for several days, including a humiliating segment where Lester Holt interviews random Britons waiting in The Queue.
Here, we have a story about a former U.S. President’s daughter discussing a meta narrative on air for four minutes about her almost having—but, ultimately, not getting—an interview with the new “Queen consort” Camilla.
CBS Sunday Morning did a 4 minute and 27 second story on her dogs. CBS Evening News regaled us with multiple stories about Queen Elizabeth II’s leisurely pastimes. (Note this is CBS’s ostensibly hard news program, not the more breezy morning show genre.) We got a 30 second segment on Elizabeth II’s horse winning a random horse race, a 1 minute and 27 second story about her as a “fashion icon,” and a 1 minute and 42 second story about Elizabeth’s American horse trainer:
CNN did four different segments on Elizabeth’s corgis alone.
And took time out to profile her personal chef and her personal “piper.”
ABC Nightly News was equally gushing, and like NBC Nightly News, flew its evening news anchor out to London for the funeral. We got a 1 minute and 16 second story on her dogs, and a cringe-inducing, groveling 1 minute and 40 second segment about her “quick wit and sense of humor.” And a teary-eyed farewell to “her majesty.”
Meanwhile, on September 9, a study published in the journal Science, found that “even the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to well below 2°C and preferably 1.5°C is not safe as 1.5°C and above risks crossing multiple tipping points.”
The researchers warn, “This finding provides a compelling reason to limit additional warming as much as possible”.
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