Climate change discourse in mass media: application of computer-assisted content analysis (original) (raw)
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Content Analysis Methods for Assessing Climate Change Communication and Media Portrayals
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Journal of Risk Research, 2021
This paper explores the contribution of software-based tools that are increasingly used for the semi-automated analysis of large volumes of text, especially Topic Modelling and Corpus Linguistics. These tools highlight the potential of getting interesting and new insights quickly, but at a cost. Linguistic aspects need to be considered carefully if computer-assisted technologies are to provide valid and reliable results. Main features of these tools will be presented, and some general problems and limitations will be discussed. The relation between technical tools and theoretical frameworks is discussed. The main empirical reference is the case of climate change.
Discourses around climate change in the news media
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Ever since the publication of their first report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has described the origin of climate change as anthropogenic and, declaring it as ‘unequivocal’ in 2007. Nevertheless, societies worldwide react in different ways while the level of scepticism remains high and the scientific evidence is challenged. This research examines the ways printed newspapers have framed climate change issues across four countries: Britain, Brazil, Germany and Italy. Our ultimate aim is to investigate the role that mass media in shaping public opinion. These countries are all major emitters of greenhouse gases but their citizens reveal different attitudes and different levels of concern towards climate-change related issues (PEW 2010; EC 2011). Here, we are interested in examining the similarities and differences across these four countries regarding the debate around climate change issues within the news media. More specifically, we aim to explore the followi...
Frontiers in Communication, 2019
The news media play an influential role in shaping public attitudes on a wide range of issues—climate change included. As climate change has risen in salience, the average American is much more likely to be exposed to news coverage now than in the past. Yet, we don’t have a clear understanding of how the content of this news coverage has changed over time, despite likely playing an important part in fostering or inhibiting public support and engagement in climate action. In this paper we use a combination of automated and manual content analysis of the most influential media sources in the U.S. -the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press- to illustrate the prevalence of different frames in the news coverage of climate change and their dynamics over time from the start of the climate change debate in 1988. Specifically, we focus on three types of frames, based on previous research: economic costs and benefits associated with climate mitigation, appeals to conservative and free market values and principles, and uncertainties and risk surrounding climate change. We find that many of the frames found to reduce people’s propensity to support and engage in climate action have been on the decline in the mainstream media, such as frames emphasizing potential economic harms of climate mitigation policy or uncertainty. At the same time, frames conducive to such engagement by the general public have been on the rise, such as those highlighting economic benefits of climate action. News content is also more likely now than in the past to use language emphasizing risk and danger, and to use the present tense. To the extent that media framing plays an important role in fostering climate action in the public, these are welcome developments.
Lessons from Media-Centered Climate Change Literature
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Climate change has become a global challenge over the years and the media has played an important part in the dissemination of information, research on which constitutes a substantial body of scientific literature. This study aimed to map media-centered climate change articles to highlight the relevant lessons within the field. The lessons learned are as follows. (1) Two environmental communication journals are the primary publication venues that prioritize climate change-focused articles. (2) Media-centered climate change literature peaked in 2020, and (3) many countries attracted scholarly interest. (4) Newspapers were examined more than any other media form. (5) The first authors of media-centered climate change articles are westerners. (6) Almost 50% of media-centered climate change articles did not adopt a theory. (7) Quantitative and (8) content analysis methods are the most adopted data collection methods. (9) Finally, this review shows that communication and media scholars a...
Public Understanding of Science
This study examines non-editorial news coverage in leading U.S. newspapers as a source of ideological differences on climate change. A quantitative content analysis compared how the threat of climate change and efficacy for actions to address it were represented in climate change coverage across The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and USA Today between 2006 and 2011. Results show that The Wall Street Journal was least likely to discuss the impacts of and threat posed by climate change, and most likely to include negative efficacy information and use conflict and negative economic framing when discussing actions to address climate change. The inclusion of positive efficacy information was similar across newspapers. Also, across all newspapers, climate impacts and actions to address climate change were more likely to be discussed separately than together in the same article. Implications for public engagement and ideological polarization are discussed. Polarizing News 3 Polarizing News? Representations of Threat and Efficacy in Leading U.S. Newspapers' Coverage of Climate Change The global scientific community is in widespread agreement that climate change is occurring and that the majority of observed warming in the climate system is due to human activities (IPCC, 2013). In the U.S., recent reports indicate that climate impacts are already being felt across the country (Melillo, Richmond, & Yohe, 2014; Romero-Lankao et al., 2014); however, public opinion remains divided on the issue. These divisions increasingly fall along ideological lines, with liberals more accepting of and concerned about climate change than conservatives (McCright & Dunlap, 2011). Various explanations have been advanced to account for this polarization, prominent among them the media's conflicting information flows on the issue (McCright & Dunlap, 2011). In a high-choice media environment that facilitates selective exposure to like-minded news, distinct cues about climate change can polarize attitudes of opposing partisans (Feldman, Myers, Hmielowski, & Leiserowitz, 2014). Scholars interested in how representations of climate change vary across U.S. media outlets primarily have focused on cable news organizations (e.g., Feldman, Maibach, Roser-Renouf, & Leiserowitz, 2011), such as MSNBC and Fox News, which are well known for their respective liberal and conservative orientations. However, these outlets tend to attract a relatively narrow audience of strong partisans (Levendusky, 2013) and therefore may not fully account for the media's effects on opinion polarization among the broader U.S. population. Thus, this study instead focuses on representations of climate change in the straight news coverage of leading U.S. newspapers, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and USA Today. In addition to these newspapers being among the nation's most read (Alliance for Audited Media, 2013), they differ from one another in the political slant Polarizing News 4 of their coverage and the partisan composition of their audiences (e.g. Gentzkow & Shapiro, 2010, 2011; Groseclose & Milyo, 2005). This suggests that there may be disparities in their reporting on climate change, with implications for the ideological divides in U.S. public opinion. Although climate change coverage in U.S. newspapers has been widely studied (e.g., Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004; Boykoff, 2007a), the potential for differences between newspapers, particularly in non-editorial coverage, has received scant attention, a gap this study helps to fill. This study also advances a novel framework for analyzing representations of climate change in the press. Prior analyses of climate change coverage in U.S. newspapers have focused on claims of scientific uncertainty. For example, Boykoff and Boykoff (2004) found that between 1988 and 2002, the U.S. prestige presswhich includes the newspapers we study herediverged significantly from the scientific view on climate change by giving equal attention to a small group of skeptics who questioned human contributions to global warming. However, by 2005, evidence for this false balance largely disappeared (Boykoff, 2007a; Nisbet, 2011). Thus, in the current study, which evaluates newspaper coverage between 2006 and 2011, we move away from analyzing claims of uncertainty about climate science and instead analyze how information about the threat of climate change and efficacy for actions to address it is communicated. Using content analysis, we examine threat and efficacy information both directly and indirectly, through the discussion and framing of climate change impacts and actions. To our knowledge, this is the first study to analyze representations of threat and efficacy in climate change news reporting in the U.S. prestige press. The current study builds on prior research (Authors, 2014), which analyzed the representation of threat and efficacy in U.S. network TV news coverage of climate change.
The framing of climate change in New Zealand newspapers from June 2009 to June 2010.
We investigated the framing of climate change science in New Zealand newspapers using quantitative content analysis of articles published in The New Zealand Herald, The Press and The Dominion Post between June 2009 and June 2010. The study sample of 540 articles was collected through the electronic news database Factiva, using the search terms ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’. Frames were analysed deductively according to an experimental frame typology. Sources were also coded and basic descriptive data recorded. Content analysis showed the Politics (26%), Social Progress (21%) and Economic Competitiveness (16%) frames were the most prominent in coverage. Political actors (33%) and Academics (20%) appeared most commonly as sources, while Sceptics represented just 3% of total sources identified. The results suggest that New Zealand newspapers have presented climate change in accordance with the scientific consensus position since 2009, focusing on discussion of political, social and economic responses and challenges.
Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online
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