The representation of future generations in newspaper coverage of climate change: A study of the UK press

Abstract

Climate change will rob future generations—today's children and those yet to be born—of the stable climate that previous generations have enjoyed. The article explores how future generations are represented in climate change coverage in the UK national press. We examine the ‘popular’ (Mail, Mirror) and ‘quality’ (Guardian, Telegraph) press from 2010 to March 2019. We found that little attention was given to future generations; young people rarely spoke and, along with those yet to be born, were represented in ways that obscured the temporal and social inequalities that are built into climate change.

The Greta effect: Visualising climate protest in UK media and the Getty images collections

“…This framing is powerful because it draws on the purity and innocence of children, but presents children as confrontational and active, rather than passive recipients (Bain and Bongiorno, 2019). The intergenerational justice framing of climate change has been identified in textual media in both the UK (Graham and Bell, 2020) and Germany (von Zabern and Tulloch, 2021), but is not common. In contrast, the findings presented here have shown that, visually, the intergenerational justice framing is not only present, but emphasised, in media coverage of climate change protest.…”

Climate Change and Emotions: Analysis of People’s Emotional States in Southern Ecuador

“…(b) Institutional intervention and/or media coverage: this helps making available to the general public scientific knowledge in a non-specialist and comprehensible way (Mercado, 2012;Boykoff, 2013;Jaspal and Nerlich, 2014;Graham and De Bell, 2020). Yet, it has been found that the media can manipulate grammatically or lexically climate messages causing uncertainty among the public about the ultimate causes of climate change (Bailey et al, 2014).…”

Utilizing attributive patterns as a linguistic classification tool of newspapers

“…In all these indices prescribed, elite newspapers perform the best of the roles and have the best features. For instance, elite newspapers often target the more formally educated readers, have better reputations, have a comprehensive network of distribution that makes them more nationalistic, dictate the content and style of journalism in their countries and observe greater standards of journalistic professionalism and ethical responsibility (Ali et al, 2019;Graham & de Bell, 2021;Stanley, 2012;Tirosh et al, 2022). The roles elite newspapers perform cannot be associated with nonelite newspapers that typically take an interest in publishing soft news related to sex, gossip and infotainment, among others.…”