Credit: ©iStockphoto/Lilli Day

The media plays an influential role in public understanding of science, so it's important that key facts are reported correctly. Despite some prominent scientific criticism of press coverage on the rise in sea level, it seems that major newspapers in the UK and US have largely got their reporting on this issue right, research shows.

Ursula Rick and colleagues from the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Colorado, Boulder, analysed how projections of sea-level rise in the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and from a sample of the scientific literature were represented in seven prominent UK and US newspapers from 1989 to 2009.

With few exceptions, journalists had accurately portrayed scientific research on sea-level rise projections to 2100. Peaks in reporting were found to coincide with events such as major international policy negotiations rather than with the release of new research results, suggesting coverage is driven by political factors rather than just the research developments themselves.