Hello and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. In this season, we are going chapter by chapter of a great new book that pulls together, all of the social science that we have so far, peer-reviewed social science, on climate obstruction globally. It's called climate obstruction, a global

assessment. It's been pulled together by the Climate Social Science Network at Brown,

which includes hundreds of social scientists working all over the world on trying to understand

this issue. Today, we are digging into a subject that is near and dear to my heart,

the role of PR and media in climate obstruction.

And to do that, I'm joined by two people who have been guests on this show before,

Melissa Aroncheck at Rutgers University and Max Boykoff from the University of Colorado at

Boulder. We had a great conversation about the role that media plays both in helping to shape the

public's understanding of climate and therefore the role it can play in obstruction, especially if it is targeted by

bad faith actors, which it often is. It's a super interesting conversation. I hope you enjoy it

as much as I did. That's coming up right after this quick break. My name is Max Boycott.

I'm a professor here in environmental studies and a fellow in the Cooperative Institute for Research and Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder in the U.S.

I'm Melissa Oranjic. I'm a professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

So I've probably talked to both of you about this separately before, but it does

seem to me that the media often avoids responsibility for climate obstruction or for playing

any kind of a role in it. I think you show really clearly here how it's kind of been used as a tool.

So I want to kind of start by having you explain how particularly the weaponization of this journalistic norm

balanced reporting has contributed to the disparity between scientific consensus and the public's

understanding of climate change. Yeah, I'm happy to start us off. If you'll allow me to back out

just a little bit to answer that question.

I think if we look back through time, we can track, in our group, the media of climate

change observatory has done this where we've tracked media coverage of climate change over

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