Framing of climate change in newspaper coverage of the East Anglia e-mail scandal

Abstract

In late 2009, a series of e-mails related to climate research were made public following the hacking into a server and the e-mail accounts of researchers at the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit. According to some skeptics of climate change research, the content of those e-mails suggested data were being manipulated, while climate scientists said their words were taken out of context. The news coverage of this scandal provides an opportunity to consider media framing. This study has two aims: to extend previous research using a cluster analysis technique to discern frames in media texts; and to provide insight into newspaper coverage of the scandal, which is often referred to as “Climategate.” This study examines the frames present in two British and two American newspapers’ coverage of the issue.

Frames of scientific evidence: How journalists represent the (un)certainty of molecular medicine in science television programs

“…We call these patterns frames" (Matthes and Kohring, 2008: 263). Such a pattern is identified as the product of the selection and construction of a journalist (Bowe et al, 2012); however, this operationalization has a text-framing orientation (Kohring and Matthes, 2002) and some advantages: 5 Frames are not pre-defined but measured with the help of operationalized frame elements, thus, this method improves reliability and validity of a content analysis and has proven to be "consistent and convincing" (Donk et al, 2012: 12).…”

“…Problem definition refers to the variables identifying relevant actors and topics (Bowe et al, 2012). It is a central aspect of an event that an actor has commented on (Matthes and Kohring, 2008).…”

U.S. Newspapers Provide Nuanced Picture of Islam

“…This is the most commonly used clustering algorithm in framing research. 54 In this procedure the analysis begins with a In the next step, the two most similar individual cases are united into a new cluster. This process is repeated (making it a hierarchical method) until there remains a single cluster of all cases (making it an agglomerative method).…”

Caracterizando controversias sociocientíficas en la prensa escrita. Una herramienta para el desarrollo de la alfabetización científica

“…Determinar CSC en prensa es importante puesto que, de una parte la selección de noticias con controversias debe ser el paso previo de todo docente que quiera utilizar la prensa en el aula de ciencias (Jarman y McClune, 2007;Bowe et al, 2014). De otra, y como ya hemos señalado, el uso de prensa con CSC permite fomentar desarrollar la alfabetización científica, una de las principales finalidades en la Enseñanza de las Ciencias, utilizando como contexto las CSC que normalmente surgen cuando existe una diferencia de opiniones o desacuerdos entre periodistas, ciudadanos y científicos pero que además están sometidas a otros intereses.…”

“…En la literatura hemos encontrado estudios de prensa donde se analiza el contenido de distintas temáticas controvertidas como el cambio climático (e.g. Poberezshkaya, 2015;Bowe et al, 2014); también existen investigaciones acerca del carácter consensuado que presentan las noticias científicas (e.g. Vílchez, 2009).…”