The increasing interconnectedness of the world that characterizes the process of globalization compels us to interlink local, national, and transnational phenomena, such as environmental risks, in both journalistic and academic discourse. Among environmental risks of global scope climate change is probably the one receiving the most attention at present, not least in the media. Globalization notwithstanding, national media are still dominated by a national logic in the presentation of news, and tensions arise between this media logic and the transnational character of environmental risks that call for a collective responsibility transcending the borders of the nation-states. This article presents results from studies of the construction of global climate change in three Swedish newspapers. It discusses the media's attribution of responsibility for collective action along an axis ranging from local to national to transnational, and highlights the media's reluctance to display any kind of scientific uncertainty that would undermine the demand for collective action. The results underline the media's responsiveness to the political setting in which they operate and the growing relevance of the transnational political realm of Europe for the construction of news frames on global climate change in European national media.

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Much research on the discursive construction of Europe in national news media has quantitatively focused on the presence of ‘EU topics’. The more frequently EU topics appear, the better the breeding-ground for a sense of European community, it is argued. This article tackles the question of a European identity from a different angle. Guided by theories on collective identity and power, and utilizing qualitative discourse analysis of the reporting on climate change in a tabloid newspaper and public service television news in Sweden, this article discerns a budding European political identity, discursively embedded and ‘hidden’ in the reporting as the natural order of things. When turned into common-sense knowledge, the European realm as a representative of ‘Us’ is accorded spontaneous legitimacy as a relevant political power in the making of meaning on climate change.

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This paper suggests some further avenues of empirical and theoretical investigation for media research on climate change. "Old" suggestions, whose significance, as we see it, needs to be further reinforced, are included, as are "new" ones, which we hope will generate innovative research questions. In order to integrate the analysis with knowledge generated by media research at large, we revisit four research challenges that media scholars have long grappled with in the investigation of journalism: (1) the discursive challenge, i.e. the production, content and reception of media discourse; (2) the interdisciplinary challenge, i.e. how media research might engage in productive collaboration with other disciplines; (3) the international challenge, i.e. how to achieve a more diverse and complex understanding of news reporting globally; and (4) the practical challenge, i.e. how to reduce the theory-practice divide in media research.