“Too Infernally Scientific”: John Wesley Powell and News Framing of Climate Policy in the Nineteenth-Century Press

Abstract

In 1890, John Wesley Powell launched a plan to reshape land use polices in the western United States. His proposal, grounded in science, sought to protect vulnerable water rights and garnered US press attention for eight months. Using qualitative historical analysis combined with quantitative content analysis to examine the story frames used by 281 newspapers in some 798 articles covering the debate over Powell’s proposal, this study fills a conspicuous gap in researchers’ understandings of the history of climate coverage in the US. It discovers that news coverage overwhelmingly focused on a political conflict frame that deemphasized the substance both of Powell’s proposal and the alternatives offered by his opponents. Finally, it illustrates the usefulness of applying contemporary frames to historical questions and highlights the partisan sectional identity dominant in the American West in the 1890s.