80% of America’s Most Popular Media Shows Have Spread Climate Misinformation, Shows Analysis

From Joe Rogan to Jordan Peterson, most of the US’s most popular ‘new media’ figures have spread false or misleading information about climate change.

A third of Americans now listen to a podcast at least once a week, and about one in five regularly get news from social media influencers. That has created an almost perfect environment (no pun intended) for climate misinformation, given that nine out of the 10 top online shows in the US are right-leaning and climate-denying, according to a report by Media Matters for America.

Of these shows, 80% have spread misleading information about climate change, further analysis by Yale Climate Connections has found.

“Much of the climate-related misinformation spread on these shows follows a revamped playbook of climate denial that focuses on denying the effectiveness of solutions and argues that climate change is beneficial,” it said. “Influencers Jordan Peterson and Charlie Kirk also presented those concerned about climate change as adherents of a ‘pseudo-religion’.”

The findings come at a time when climate misinformation is rampant in the US, not helped by the fact that President Donald Trump is himself a climate sceptic. Americans are also now getting more of their news from new media formats like podcasts and YouTube shows – which don’t have to adhere to the same journalistic ethics and standards as traditional mainstream media outlets.

Research shows that the number of Americans who consume news on social media rose from 19% in 2021 to 25% in 2024, with YouTube and Facebook outpacing other platforms on this metric. This digital media landscape’s tilt towards misinformation is only making things worse when it comes to climate action.

Do Americans believe climate change is real?

There’s conflicting research about climate denialism and scepticism in the US. Ahead of last year’s presidential election, 85% of Gen Z Americans were concerned about climate change, and 58% “very” or “extremely” so. And 86% of Democrats, 75% of independents, and 62% of Republicans said they’d vote for candidates who support “aggressive policies to reduce climate change”.

According to a survey in August, 25% of US citizens are doubtful or dismissive of the climate crisis. This year, a Gallup poll found that 51% of Americans don’t find climate change to be a serious threat, a higher share than those who do.

The underlying trend is that climate scepticism skews Republican in the US. Nearly a quarter of Congress members in 2024 were identified as climate deniers, and each of them belonged to the GOP.

The Gallup survey revealed that 14% of Republican voters don’t feel threatened by climate change, and only three in 10 believe its effects have already begun, despite last year’s floods hitting red states the most.

Notably, 78% of Republicans believe the mainstream media exaggerates the seriousness of the crisis, compared to just 6% of Democrats and 38% of independents; there’s a cause-and-effect relationship between this belief and what popular podcasts and online shows, which make up the new media ecosystem, are disseminating.

The new kind of climate denial

According to Media Matters, right-leaning shows make up the majority of the online new media landscape in the US, and have five times as many followers.

Many of these have platformed Danish climate denier Bjørn Lomborg, whom Yale Climate Communications says climate scientists have pleaded with to stop misrepresenting their science. He has appeared on the shows of Joe Rogan (the US’s most popular podcast), Ben Shapiro and Russell Brand, among others.

Yet others call climate change a hoax designed to control the public. “Climate change is the wrapper around Marxism. You have Marxism at its core and you have climate change on the exterior. Climate change activism, environmentalism, pseudo-paganism – we call it a Trojan horse,” Kirk has said.

In Yale Climate Communications’ analysis, only two shows shared accurate climate information: the right-leaning This Past Weekend with Theo Von, and What Now? with Trevor Noah, the only left-leaning show in the top 10.

The rest have engaged in what is termed ‘new denial’. It represents a shift from the old patterns of climate scepticism, which rejected that climate change was happening or caused by humans. New denial content suggests that climate solutions are unworkable, that the science is unreliable, and that climate change’s impacts are harmless (or even beneficial).

According to hate crime watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate, such content only made up 35% of total climate denial videos on YouTube in 2018, but rose to 70% in 2023. Many videos have launched attacks on climate science, calling it unreliable or uncertain, with some saying that the whole climate movement is unreliable, alarmist or corrupt.

A perfect example of this is Elon Musk’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, where he and the host championed beef consumption and raised doubts over the scientifically established climate harms of animal agriculture.

“It’s not going to make any difference to global warming or the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere if people eat pure steaks. It doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant,” Musk said during the podcast, which has racked up 19 million views on YouTube. “You can totally eat as much meat as you want.”

Money matters – as does policy

For these creators, spreading misinformation is a good way to turn a buck. CCDH’s research found that YouTube’s policies bar monetisation from old denial, but don’t cover new denial. Further, the video-sharing service was still serving ads on both forms of denial, at least as of January last year.

So money talks. Many of these shows are backed by the fossil fuel industry, which spends a lot of its time lobbying for misinformation. Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire, for example, got its start with the help of petroleum billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks, who injected $4.7M into the company.

The Wilkses have also been major backers of PragerU, a conservative media firm that engages in rampant climate misinformation and spends half its annual budget on marketing.

Analysis by the Center for American Progress, which revealed the depths of climate denial in Congress, also found that the 123 Republicans it identified had received over $52M in lifetime campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry, led by Texas Senator Ted Cruz ($5M).

All this comes just as Trump continues to roll back scores of policies aimed at helping Americans learn about and deal with the impacts of climate change. He has withdrawn support for most climate research, including any research that so much as mentions the term that even mentions the term, and purged government websites hosting climate data to make the evidence disappear.

However, only 34% of Americans think their government is doing enough to tackle the crisis, and twice that number believe it should be a criminal offence for senior government officials to take actions that would cause widespread, irreversible damage to the planet.

So while the desire for climate action is very much there, so is a lack of education, thanks in large part to the influencer economy. Two in three influencers don’t check facts, leading the UN to co-launch a global course to help them verify sources, detect disinformation, and work with traditional and reliable media outlets.

Moreover, social media companies themselves are not doing enough to crack down on misinformation and disinformation. While their founders and CEOs claim to support climate change, in the past few years, these companies have made it easier for such inaccurate and harmful information to be propagated by loosening content policies and removing most fact-checking teams.