Politicized or popularized? News values and news voices in China’s and Australia’s media discourse of climate change

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite worsening material realities of the climate, discursive tensions between a need to popularize climate issue and an increasing politicization trend in climate change communication continue to unfold. Politicizing climate change as an ideological conflict may mislead the public to perceive it as essentially a topic about politics rather than science and health. It also creates discursive and real political space for local governments and intergovernmental organizations to defray responsibilities and delay action. To closely examine the ways popularization and politicization are localized, this article focuses how the same issue was discursively constructed as different newsworthy events vis-à-vis news voices of different power status in People’s Daily and Sydney Morning Herald, the most read newspaper in China and Australia respectively. Findings demonstrate that while People’s Daily tends to globalize China’s local climate efforts and polarizes the climate issue as international conflicts between developed and developing countries in general, and between China and the US in particular, Australia’s media tends to localize global climate efforts and represents it as domestic conflicts between the Coalition government and the rest of domestic society. Findings were explained by recourse to different societal functions of news media and changing power dynamics.