Media Representations Of Climate Change Research Articles

Who’s responsible for climate change? Untangling threads of media discussions in India, Nigeria, Australia, and the USA

Media representations of climate change play a critical role in shaping public perceptions and knowledge of climate change. Public understanding of climate change and the responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions are especially important, as these shape social problem definition, in turn influencing policy responses. In this study, we aimed to understand print media discourses on the existence and responsibility for climate change. We contrasted two Global North countries—the USA and Australia—and two Global South countries—India and Nigeria. We examined 600 newspaper articles, randomly selecting 50 articles each from three newspapers in each country. We conducted discourse analysis to examine narratives on climate change existence and who bears responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions. We found media from all four countries agreed that climate change was real. Narratives of responsibility, however, varied between countries. In Australia, the primary narrative stated that India and China were responsible for the majority of emissions, while abdicating Australia from responsibility. In contrast in the USA, the primary narrative focused on the country’s own responsibility. In India, the primary responsibility was assigned to the Global North, while in Nigeria, all countries were considered equally responsible for global emissions. We demonstrated that media narratives for climate change responsibility were primarily driven by political discourse. As the majority of the public depends on media for information on climate change, it is essential that narratives of responsibility incorporate scientific evidence and not follow purely political expedient discourses to assign responsibility for action.

Politicization and Polarization in Climate Change News Content, 1985-2017

Despite concerns about politicization and polarization in climate change news, previous work has not been able to offer evidence concerning long-term trends. Using computer-assisted content analyses of all climate change articles from major newspapers in the United States between 1985 and 2017, we find that media representations of climate change have become (a) increasingly politicized, whereby political actors are increasingly featured and scientific actors less so and (b) increasingly polarized, in that Democratic and Republican discourses are markedly different. These findings parallel trends in U.S. public opinion, pointing to these features of news coverage as polarizing influences on climate attitudes.

Representing the “invisible crime” of climate change in an age of post-truth

This article builds on prior writing on the ophthalmological aspects of climate change to argue that in an age of climate change denial and “post-truth”—which Oxford Dictionaries defines as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”—developing a visual language of climate change becomes of paramount importance. This article suggests that while media representations of climate change may serve to reduce climate change to a stock set of visual clichés certain art may improve our visual acuity of climate change. Accordingly, this article looks at select examples of artwork on the causes and consequences of climate change and considers the capacity of such work to inspire personal and political action.

New “Folk Devils,” Denials and Climate Change: Applying the Work of Stanley Cohen to Green Criminology and Environmental Harm

This article pays homage to Stan Cohen by applying his work to green criminology. It draws on Cohen’s notions of “denial,” “folk devils” and “moral panic” to analyze and assess “climate change contrarianism”—organized efforts to diminish scientific consensus on the existence and extent of climate change and its potential impact on human and nonhuman life. We begin by arguing that “climate change contrarians” have painted climate change as a moral issue and have attempted to transform climate scientists into “folk devils.” We then contemplate the meaning and significance of media representations of climate change and the way in which such depictions have contributed to the lack of consequential state and international measures, treaties or protocols on climate change.

Media Representations of Climate Change: A Meta-Analysis of the Research Field

A flurry of studies in recent years has analyzed the role of media in climate change communication. This article provides a systematic, large-scale, and up-to-date overview of the objects and characteristics of this research field through a meta-analysis. It identifies 133 relevant studies and analyzes them empirically. The results show that research activity has risen strongly over time, and that the analytical spectrum has expanded to include an increasing number of countries, more types of media including online and social media, and different methodological approaches. The analysis also demonstrates, however, that scholarship in the field still concentrates strongly on Western countries and print media.

Media attention for climate change around the world: A comparative analysis of newspaper coverage in 27 countries

Climate change is a global phenomenon, and its outcomes affect societies around the world. So far, however, studies on media representations of climate change have mostly concentrated on Western societies. This paper goes beyond this limited geographical scope by presenting a comparative analysis of issue attention in 27 countries. The sample includes, among others, countries that have committed themselves to greenhouse gas emission reductions under the Kyoto Protocol such as Germany as well as countries that are strongly affected by the consequences of climate change like India. In a first step, it describes the development of media attention for climate change in these countries from 1996 to 2010. Second, it compares the amount of media attention and explores whether it corresponds with indicators measuring the relevance of climate change and climate policies for a country. The analyses show that climate change coverage has increased in all countries. Still, overall media attention levels, as well as the extent of growth over time, differ strongly between countries. Media attention is especially high in carbon dependent countries with commitments under the Kyoto Protocol.

Political economy, media, and climate change: sinews of modern life

In this 21st century, examining how climate change is described and considered, largely through mass media, is as important as formal climate governance to the long‐term success or failure of efforts to confront the challenge. Mass media stitch together formal science and policy with the public sphere. And many dynamic, contested factors contribute to how media outlets portray climate change. This paper addresses contemporary political economics—from greater workloads and reductions in specialist science journalism to digital innovations and new media organizational forms—as they relate to media coverage of climate change. By way of recent studies and indications of these dynamics, we appraise how power flows through culture, politics, and society, to construct coverage, public discourses, and knowledge on climate change. In so doing, we explore how media representations of climate change have changed over time, and particularly how the rise of digital media has reshaped climate coverage. Considerations of climate change, arguably the most heavily politicized scientific issue at the turn of the new millennium, seek to inform and anticipate corollary science issues, such as ongoing concerns for genetically modified organisms, nanotechnology risks, and increased threats to water quantity and quality. The focus on political economy—the ‘sinews’ of modern life—can also then help to inform perceptions and decision making in associated environmental challenges.WIREs Clim Change2013, 4:359–371. doi: 10.1002/wcc.233This article is categorized under:Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > CommunicationSocial Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Knowledge and Practice

Boykoff, Maxwell T. (2011). Who speaks for the climate? Making sense of media reporting on climate change.

Maxwell Boykoff works at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado-Boulder. His area of interest is the nexus between environmental issues and mass media; he specializes in the “cultural politics” of the media representations of climate change. Most people probably know him for his work on “balance as bias” in climate change coverage. In 2004, he argued in a publication in Global Environmental Change, coauthored with his brother, that the tendency of the U.S. prestige press to aim for journalistic balance made these news media pay disproportional attention to climate change sceptics. This resulted, they argued, in biased climate change coverage. Boykoff later expanded this analysis to other countries (primarily the U.K.), media (tabloids and TV news), and time periods, also including other aspects of climate change. In the reviewed book, these studies are combined with analyses from other authors in an overall assessment of climate change reporting.

When climate science became climate politics: British media representations of climate change in 1988

Climate change has become a pressing environmental concern for scientists, social commentators and politicians. Previous social science research has explored media representations of climate change in various temporal and geographical contexts. Through the lens of Social Representations Theory, this article provides a detailed qualitative thematic analysis of media representations of climate change in the 1988 British broadsheet press, given that this year constitutes an important juncture in this transition of climate change from the domain of science to that of the socio-political sphere. The following themes are outlined: (i) "Climate change: a multi-faceted threat"; (ii) "Collectivisation of threat"; (iii) "Climate change and the attribution of blame"; and (iv) "Speculative solutions to a complex socio-environmental problem." The article provides detailed empirical insights into the "starting-point" for present-day disputes concerning climate change and lays the theoretical foundations for tracking the continuities and discontinuities characterising social representations of climate change in the future.

The local impact of global climate change: reporting on landscape transformation and threatened identity in the English regional newspaper press

This paper contributes to extant understandings of media representations of climate change by examining the role of the English regional newspaper press in the transformation and dissemination of climate change discourse. Unlike previous accounts, this paper contends that such newspapers shape public understandings of climate change in ways that have yet to be adequately charted. With this in mind, this paper examines the ways in which global climate change is translated into a locally relevant phenomenon. That is, it focuses on its "domestication." Although we acknowledge that there are a number of ways in which this process occurs, specific attention is drawn to stories that highlight the destruction of local landscape features, the transformation of important habitats, and the arrival of "alien" species. The broader significance of such stories is considered in relation to long-standing debates concerning the importance of landscape to notions of national and regional identity.

Indian media representations of climate change in a threatened journalistic ecosystem

As 2010 unfolds, environmental journalism around the world is fraught with capacity challenges to collectively cover complex and dynamic stories at the human– environment interface. Recent years have seen significant reductions in journalistic ecosystem services. Examples abound: CNN slashed their entire science, technology, and environment reporting unit; the Seattle Post-Intelligencer discontinued their print run; the Los Angeles Times had cut their newsroom staff in half in the last dozen years; the Rocky Mountain News shuttered their doors altogether. It has been estimated that approximately 25% of the news industry’s workforce has been cut since 2001 (Pew 2009; Boykoff 2009). Concurrently, the number of newspapers that featured weekly science sections atrophied, losing nearly two-thirds in the past two decades (Pew 2009; Carroll 2006). In many places in the Global South, journalists continue to lack the capacity and training to cover the intricacies of climate science and policy, as well as lack access to clear, timely and understandable climate-related resources and images (Harbison 2006; Shanahan 2009). Journalists, editors, and organizations surviving newsroom cuts and shortfalls have been left to cover the contours of climate change along tighter deadlines, and with increased multi-platform demands (video, audio and text along with blogs, Twitter, Grogs (see www.getgrogger.com), YouTube postings etc). Moreover, in the name of efficiency, reporters increasingly cover a vast range of beats, making it as difficult as ever to satisfactorily portray the complexities of climate change. Put simply, journalists and editors striving for fair and accurate reporting are getting swamped by these larger scale pressures (Boykoff 2007). Yet in this perilous landscape, 2009 ended with soaring media coverage of climate change around the world. Climate news seemingly flooded the public arena. The

The Politics of Accuracy in Judging Global Warming Films

In 2007, two documentaries about global warming—An Inconvenient Truth and The Great Global Warming Swindle—became subject to legal and regulatory challenges in the UK. This paper examines the limitations of appeals to accuracy in these two cases. Rather than terminating debate, the discourse of accuracy engenders a representational regress which serves only to generate further controversy. Accuracy claims become particularly problematic in the case of documentary film where the role of the visual image must be accounted for. In particular, the ambiguous figural status of the image in science documentaries makes accuracy an inadequate means by which to judge such films. I suggest that rather than being considered in isolation, accuracy needs to be understood as one of several textual features which together construct the truthfulness of a text. The integrity of the text emerges as the most meaningful concept for evaluating media representations of climate change.

The cultural politics of climate change discourse in UK tabloids

In the United Kingdom (UK), daily circulation figures for tabloid newspapers are as much as ten times higher than broadsheet sources. Nonetheless, studies of media representations of climate change in the UK to date have focused on broadsheet newspapers. Moreover, readership patterns correlate with socio-economic status; the majority of readers of tabloids are in ‘working class’ demographics. With a growing need to engage wider constituencies in awareness and potential behavioral change, it is important to examine how these influential sources represent climate change for a heretofore understudied segment of citizenry. This paper links political geographies with cultural issues of identity and discourse, through claims and frames on climate change in four daily ‘working class’ tabloid newspapers in UK – The Sun (and News of the World), Daily Mail (and Mail on Sunday), the Daily Express (and Sunday Express), and the Mirror (and Sunday Mirror). Through triangulated Critical Discourse Analysis, investigations of framing and semi-structured interviews, this project examines representations of climate change in these newspapers from 2000 through 2006. Data show that news articles on climate change were predominantly framed through weather events, charismatic megafauna and the movements of political actors and rhetoric, while few stories focused on climate justice and risk. In addition, headlines with tones of fear, misery and doom were most prevalent. These analyses then enable discussions of how these representations may influence ongoing climate science and governance interactions as well as political geographies, and (re)shape the contemporary cultural politics of climate change discourse.