Hitting the Headlines and Falling Down Again: Newspaper Coverage of Climate Change in Finland (original) (raw)
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Is there an emerging transnational public sphere? In the context of general globalization trends, this question has gained importance in the communication sciences in recent years. In particular, transnational public spheres have been expected around global issues such as climate change. We therefore analyze whether climate change coverage from leading print media in 2327 countries worldwide shows signs of transnationalization. We look for a potential Europeanization, ‘Westernization’ or globalization in terms of issue attention levels, issue attention peaks and temporal trends. The analysis shows both transnational and transnationalizing issue-attention. However, such tendencies are limited to European and North American countries. There is no evidence for the existence or emergence of a global public sphere in our data.
Mainstreaming climate policy: the role of media coverage in Finland
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Integration of climate change adaptation and mitigation measures into other policies is considered to be a precondition for effective climate policies. This paper explores the role of mass media coverage as a potential obstacle or enhancing factor in relation to this mainstreaming of climate policies. The paper presents a quantitative content analysis of the national-level press coverage of climate change from 1990 to 2010, focusing on Finland. The empirical results indicate four major phases of Finnish media coverage of climate change: a definition phase before the Kyoto meeting in 1997, a maturation phase after the Kyoto meeting, climate hype in 2006-2008, and a phase of levelling off that started in late 2008. The results suggest that climate issues have widely permeated various fields of newspaper coverage. This broad-based debate may create and sustain a public agenda potentially favourable to attempts to bring climate policies into the mainstream of other policy domains. However, it also may open doors for unexpected initiatives by various activists and lobbyists that employ climate concern as a tool to advance other interests. The role of mass media has received little attention in studies focusing on the mainstreaming of climate policies. This paper highlights the importance of taking media coverage into account as a key factor in the formulation and implementation of environmental policies aimed at broad-based actions.
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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate regional variations in the international news coverage of climate change by comparing news reporting in two regional media systems.Design/methodology/approachA case study of how COP14 and a European union (EU) summit on climate change are covered by three Middle Eastern and one Danish newspaper.FindingsThe paper shows significant regional differences in the media coverage of climate change both in terms of quantity (numbers of news articles) and quality (editorial variations, sources, framing, use of graphics). Overall, the study suggests that regional differences in climate change coverage can be traced back to the financial resources, institutional practices and journalistic fields of different regional media systems.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper is a pilot project designed to test the analytical significance of regional variations in international media coverage of climate change.Originality/valueWhereas global varia...
Climate Change and the Media, 2018
A focus on international comparisons of media coverage of climate change is important because of its inherently transnational character and because of the role the media play in shaping the context within which different publics are made aware of climate change. However, there are significant gaps in our understanding of the differences between countries. The few studies that have been published show that, on the one hand, a number of important cross-national parallels exist in climate change coverage with regards to the amount of media coverage on climate change, the basic frame sets and the increasing focus on socio-political instead of scientific aspects of the issue. On the other hand, persistent differences prevail in the amount of space given to sceptical voices, the volume of coverage, and the dominant frames used to interpret climate change. Using these three (and other) metrics we would aim to draw out what we know about the main differences between Anglophone countries, continental European countries and countries in the ‘Global South’. In an increasingly fragmented media landscape in many countries, new digital-only players, such as Huffington Post, Vice and BuzzFeed, are making inroads into the dominance of legacy media with a strong emphasis on coverage of the environment and a growing presence in a variety of languages and countries.