Abstract

Amongst growing public concern about climate change, right-wing populist actors often dismiss environmental concerns as part of an elitist, transnational agenda. At the same time, so-called alternative news media play an increasingly prominent role in spreading populist ideology. How do alternative news media cover environment-related topics, and what effects does such coverage have on news consumers? Guided by the notion of populism as a communication phenomenon, we argue that alternative media produce and disseminate content critical of environmental protections. Empirically, we combine a 3-wave online panel and web-tracking data collected during the 2021 German federal election campaign and proceed as follows. Firstly, we detect environment-related news in a corpus of articles from outlets previously classified as alternative news media. Secondly, we examine latent topics and key actors present in these articles in order to find out how alternative news media cover environmental news. Thirdly, we use a longitudinal model to examine whether consuming alternative news impacts individuals’ climate attitudes. We find that alternative outlets tend to politicize environmental news, though short-term attitudinal effects are mixed and limited.

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