Polarisation vs consensus-building: how US and German news media portray climate change as a feature of political identities

Tschötschel, Robin

doi:10.1080/09644016.2022.2164410

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 54 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Yet, popular climate change narratives are particularly prone to reducing representation, as diverse interests and vulnerabilities tend to be subsumed into a "global we" fighting against the climate catastrophe. This framing is void of identity frames, which are widely assumed to provide an important basis for political mobilization (McAdam, 2017;Wetts, 2019;Tschötschel, 2023). Not at last, it concerns the authority to speak about climate futures and the agency to make visions become relevant (Leipold and Winkel, 2017;Beckert and Suckert, 2021).…”

Section: Theoretical Considerations 21 Future Visions and Post-politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Another world is possible? – Climate movements’ bounded politicization between science and politics

Pavenstädt

2024

Front. Polit. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

How we have come to think about climate futures has predominantly been shaped by science- and expert-driven assessments. As research turns to the role of future visions as a driver of social change and overcoming political gridlock, political struggles are understood as conflicts over making (alternative) desirable futures socially performative. The recent advent of the new climate movements (NCMs) has given rise to the assumption that they could contribute to a re-politicization of climate politics by introducing alternative future visions. Their names and slogans articulate future expectations, such as futures “worth studying for” (Fridays for Future) or averting extinction (Extinction Rebellion). Yet, research on the politicizing qualities of the NCMs is inconclusive. I use a new framework for examining (de-)politicization dynamics to study public communication of German factions of both movements from 2019 to 2022. The results underscore climate movements’ strong affiliation to science from their inception, yet over time, increasing attempts to adhere to principles of climate justice. However, climate movements still struggle to re-politicize climate futures beyond dominant positive visions of modernization and negative visions of collapse. I argue that this bounded politicization is indicative of the broader discursive dynamics that have weakened the ability to formulate alternative visions and discuss to what extent the centrality of scientific imaginative logics and understandings of the science–policy interface act to inhibit the articulation of alternative visions.

show abstract

Section: Theoretical Considerations 21 Future Visions and Post-politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Another world is possible? – Climate movements’ bounded politicization between science and politics

Pavenstädt

2024

Front. Polit. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…It tends to reveal important differences in media attention and news framing of climate change across the political spectrum (Carvalho and Burgess, 2005;Boykoff and Boykoff, 2007). Ideological orientation of news outlets has been shown to contribute to political polarization and consensus building in relation to climate change (Tschötschel, 2023). Structural topic modeling allows for similar considerations, although few studies have done that (Bohr, 2020).…”

Section: Related Work: Automated Content Analysis Of Climate Newsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Topic modeling three decades of climate change news in Denmark

Meier,

Eskjær

2024

Front. Commun.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Climate change is a dynamic and rapidly evolving media agenda. First associated with scientific notions of the greenhouse effect, it was later presented as global warming before reaching the current and broader picture of climate change. Over its development, climate change reporting has touched on a broad range of topics reflecting shifting scientific understandings, political interventions, and public anxieties, all of which condition the public's view and actions on climate change. To better understand which issues the Danish public has been exposed to, this study uses topic modeling to analyse 32 years of climate change communication in Denmark (1990–2021, n = 63,743). It identifies 85 topics grouped into 14 themes dealing with climate change in Danish national media outlets. Topics differ in prevalence and longitudinal stability while reflecting outlet bias in political leaning and communicative modalities. The most pronounced differences in climate change reporting are between public service media and traditional newspapers. This indicates that media users relying mainly on online news from public service providers, without additional access to print media, will receive information on climate change that is more topical and less politicized, more thematic and less structural, more about high-level politics than everyday interventions and more concerned with consequences than solutions.

show abstract

“…This position was also found to correlate with the consumption of conservative partisan media (Lorenzano et al, 2023). In general, reporting in western media is closely linked to newsroom ideologies and political identities of audiences (Tschötschel, 2023), this is especially true for climate change and even more so within right-wing alternative media (Klawier et al, 2022).…”

Section: Types Of Climate Activism: Disrupted Debates Through Disrupt...mentioning

confidence: 99%

From Disruptive Protests to Disruptive Framing? Comparing German News on Fridays for Future and Letzte Generation

Meyer,

Rauxloh,

Farjam

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper explores factors that drive polarization in news media coverage about climate protests. We develop a method for measuring polarization by means of automated text analysis and apply it to the case of climate protests in Germany. By comparing discursive polarization surrounding "The Last Generation" and "Fridays For Future" in different news outlets, we test the impact of more or less disruptive protest forms and of different political leanings of newsrooms. Utilizing Word2Vec-based semantic mapping and transformer-based emotion and toxicity classifiers, we assess the ideological and affective dimensions of polarization in 6,632 news articles coming from 21 news media between January 2022 and May 2023, covering the entire ideological spectrum. We find that newsroom policies do influence the discourse. Extreme right-wing media displaying high levels of discursive polarization when covering the relatively conventional protests. However, even mainstream and left-wing media are susceptible to frames depicting protesters as extremists and criminals and high levels of toxicity when covering the more disruptive protests. This indicates the risks for climate movements involved in employing disruptive tactics and also shows how polarizing patterns of coverage may spill over from extreme right and into mainstream media.

show abstract

Polarisation vs consensus-building: how US and German news media portray climate change as a feature of political identities

Cited by 7 publications

References 54 publications

Another world is possible? – Climate movements’ bounded politicization between science and politics

Another world is possible? – Climate movements’ bounded politicization between science and politics

Topic modeling three decades of climate change news in Denmark

From Disruptive Protests to Disruptive Framing? Comparing German News on Fridays for Future and Letzte Generation

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About