Framing Climate Change: Economics, Ideology, and Uncertainty in American News Media Content From 1988 to 2014

This study investigated whether increased technological affordances, characterized by the rise of social media, diversified communication in climate change discourse. Extending the literature of intermedia agenda setting, this study examined agenda and frame contagion across Twitter and online news media. Using a large dataset of media content about climate change, time-series analysis showed that news media played a major role in setting agendas and frames, but Twitter has increased its dominance in climate change discussions. The findings address both opportunities for strategic science communication and challenges resulting from unverified scientific claims (e.g., hoax frames) spread on social media.

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Ideological biases in social sharing of online information about climate change

PLoS ONE ◽

10.1371/journal.pone.0250656 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 16 (4) ◽

pp. e0250656

Author(s):

Tristan J. B. Cann ◽

Iain S. Weaver ◽

Hywel T. P. Williams

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Information Sharing ◽

Digital Media ◽

Network Structure ◽

News Media ◽

Political Ideology ◽

Connected Components ◽

Media Content ◽

Online Social Media ◽

The Web

Exposure to media content is an important component of opinion formation around climate change. Online social media such as Twitter, the focus of this study, provide an avenue to study public engagement and digital media dissemination related to climate change. Sharing a link to an online article is an indicator of media engagement. Aggregated link-sharing forms a network structure which maps collective media engagement by the user population. Here we construct bipartite networks linking Twitter users to the web pages they shared, using a dataset of approximately 5.3 million English-language tweets by almost 2 million users during an eventful seven-week period centred on the announcement of the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change. Community detection indicates that the observed information-sharing network can be partitioned into two weakly connected components, representing subsets of articles shared by a group of users. We characterise these partitions through analysis of web domains and text content from shared articles, finding them to be broadly described as a left-wing/environmentalist group and a right-wing/climate sceptic group. Correlation analysis shows a striking positive association between left/right political ideology and environmentalist/sceptic climate ideology respectively. Looking at information-sharing over time, there is considerable turnover in the engaged user population and the articles that are shared, but the web domain sources and polarised network structure are relatively persistent. This study provides evidence that online sharing of news media content related to climate change is both polarised and politicised, with implications for opinion dynamics and public debate around this important societal challenge.

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The U.S. broadcast news media as a social arena in the global climate change debate

10.31274/rtd-180813-16700 ◽

2007 ◽

Author(s):

Adam Jeremy Kuban

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Global Climate Change ◽

News Media ◽

Global Climate ◽

Broadcast News ◽

The U.S

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Agenda-Setting Dynamics during the Campaign Period

10.1093/oso/9780198792130.003.0002 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Julia Partheymüller

Keyword(s):

Political Parties ◽

News Media ◽

Agenda Setting ◽

Information Environment ◽

Limiting Factors ◽

Media Content ◽

Agenda Setter ◽

Memory Decay ◽

The Media

It is widely believed that the news media have a strong influence on defining what are the most important problems facing the country during election campaigns. Yet, recent research has pointed to several factors that may limit the mass media’s agenda-setting power. Linking news media content to rolling cross-section survey data, the chapter examines the role of three such limiting factors in the context of the 2009 and the 2013 German federal elections: (1) rapid memory decay on the part of voters, (2) advertising by the political parties, and (3) the fragmentation of the media landscape. The results show that the mass media may serve as a powerful agenda setter, but also demonstrate that the media’s influence is strictly limited by voters’ cognitive capacities and the structure of the campaign information environment.

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Confidence in Local, National, and International Scientists on Climate Change

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su13010272 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 13 (1) ◽

pp. 272

Author(s):

Aaron C. Sparks ◽

Heather Hodges ◽

Sarah Oliver ◽

Eric R. A. N. Smith

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Public Policy ◽

News Media ◽

Internet Survey ◽

Party Affiliation ◽

The Public ◽

Research Findings ◽

Scientific Report ◽

Media Reports ◽

Change Beliefs

In many public policy areas, such as climate change, news media reports about scientific research play an important role. In presenting their research, scientists are providing guidance to the public regarding public policy choices. How do people decide which scientists and scientific claims to believe? This is a question we address by drawing on the psychology of persuasion. We propose the hypothesis that people are more likely to believe local scientists than national or international scientists. We test this hypothesis with an experiment embedded in a national Internet survey. Our experiment yielded null findings, showing that people do not discount or ignore research findings on climate change if they come from Europe instead of Washington-based scientists or a leading university in a respondent’s home state. This reinforces evidence that climate change beliefs are relatively stable, based on party affiliation, and not malleable based on the source of the scientific report.

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