Media, Politics and Climate Change: Towards a New Research Agenda

Abstract

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time, and the media have been demonstrated to play a key role in shaping public perceptions and policy agendas. Journalists are faced with multiple challenges in covering this complex field. This article provides an overview of existing research on the media framing of climate change, highlighting major research themes and assessing future potential research developments. It argues that analysis of the reporting of climate science must be placed in the wider context of the growing concentration and globalization of news media ownership, and an increasingly 'promotional culture', highlighted by the rapid rise of the public relations industry in recent years and claims-makers who employ increasingly sophisticated media strategies. Future research will need to examine in-depth the targeting of media by a range of actors, as well as unravel complex information flows across countries as media increasingly converge.

Moving consensus and managing expectations: media and REDD+ in Indonesia

“…The dominance of national state actors within media-based discourse on REDD+ is consistent with the literature on media analysis, which finds official sources such as government representatives tend to get advantaged access to the news media and as a result become primary definers of key issues (Carvalho 2007;Anderson 2009). Nevertheless there is a broad representation of other stakeholders on REDD+ being heard in Indonesian media, which reflects the broad range of interests in the future of Indonesia's forests, particularly at a time when control of and access to forest resources remains largely unresolved (Moeliono 2009).…”

Communicating Climate Change: A Qualitative Study Exploring how Communicators and Educators are Approaching Climate-Change Discussions

“…It is important to note that only one-third of the total organizations connected their social media networking sites to their website (Jun, 2011). Anderson (2009) found that past mass media news coverage has mainly contributed to mitigation rather than adaptation options.…”

Flooding and the framing of risk in British broadsheets, 1985–2010

“…The incidence of flooding is both immediately palpable and dramatically out of the ordinary, unlike climate change, which has often depended upon other events, such as meetings of the IPCC or the international Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention, to lend it news value (Anderson 2009). Flooding, by contrast, is a newsworthy event in and of itself, conforming to journalistic norms of immediacy and factualness while also satisfying the 'if it bleeds, it leads' imperative for attention-grabbing drama (Hannigan 1995).…”