Politicization and Polarization in Climate Change News Content, 1985-2017

Chinn, Sedona; Hart, P. Sol; Soroka, Stuart

doi:10.1177/1075547019900290

Cited by 185 publications

(159 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…Examining the first months of COVID-19 news coverage may therefore help us to better understand what informed the public’s initial perceptions of COVID-19. Though research to date has not examined politicization and polarization in COVID-19 news coverage, recent research by Chinn et al (2020) investigating politicization (the degree that politicians are mentioned in conjunction with the issue) and polarization (how discussion varies based on the presence of actors from different political parties) in climate change news coverage offers a useful methodological approach for analyzing these features in news content. We draw on this approach in the present study, which uses both dictionary and unsupervised machine learning methods to investigate the degree to which newspaper and network news coverage of COVID-19 was polarized and politicized during the first 3 months of heightened news coverage (March, April, and May 2020).…”

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confidence: 99%

Politicization and Polarization in COVID-19 News Coverage

Hart

Chinn

Soroka

2020

Science Communication

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546

372

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This study examines the level of politicization and polarization in COVID-19 news in U.S. newspapers and televised network news from March to May 2020. Using multiple computer-assisted content analytic approaches, we find that newspaper coverage is highly politicized, network news coverage somewhat less so, and both newspaper and network news coverage are highly polarized. We find that politicians appear in newspaper coverage more frequently than scientists, whereas politicians and scientists are more equally featured in network news. We suggest that the high degree of politicization and polarization in initial COVID-19 coverage may have contributed to polarization in U.S. COVID-19 attitudes.

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confidence: 99%

Politicization and Polarization in COVID-19 News Coverage

Hart

Chinn

Soroka

2020

Science Communication

Self Cite

546

372

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“…Studies gauging the impact of media coverage on the public understanding of climate change (e.g. Feldman et al, 2015;Brevini and Lewis, 2018) have explored how political, corporate or consumerist discourses are contesting the weight of evidence about the causes and consequences of this phenomenon in the public arena; recent research has also revealed the extent to which collective perceptions of climate change reflect the considerable ground that political actors have gained vis-à-vis their scientific counterparts in climate news coverage over the last three decades (Chinn et al, 2020). As digital media outlets continue to increase the public's exposure to a widening range of competing climate change discourses animated by an ever more varied array of participants and stakeholders, the reasons why individuals "choose news outlets where they expect to find culturally congruent arguments about climate change" that are consistent with their "cultural way of life" (Newman et al, 2018, p. 985) are becoming an object of increasing research interest.…”

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confidence: 99%

‘Is climate science taking over the science?’: A corpus-based study of competing stances on bias, dogma and expertise in the blogosphere

Pérez-González¹

2020

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

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Climate change science has become an increasingly polarized site of controversy, where discussions on epistemological rigour are difficult to separate from debates on the impact that economic and political interests have on the production of evidence and the construction of knowledge. Little research has been conducted so far on the antagonistic discursive processes through which climate knowledge is being contested and traditional forms of expertise are being (de-)legitimized—whether by members of the scientific community or non-scientist actors. This corpus-based study contributes to previous scholarship on the climate science controversy in a number of respects. Unlike earlier studies based on the analysis of mainstream media articles, this paper interrogates a corpus of climate change blog posts published by scientists, journalists, researchers and lobbyists laying claim to core, contributory and interactional forms of expertise—as conceptualized within the third wave of science studies. Further, the corpus informing this study has been designed to reflect the complex and multivoiced nature of the climate knowledge production process. Drawn from five different blogs, the views represented are not confined to the two poles between which the entrenched dialectic of ‘alarmists’ versus ‘deniers’ is typically played out in the climate science debate. Following a systemic functional conceptualization of dialogic engagement as a means of positioning authorial voices vis-à-vis competing perspectives construed and referenced in a text, this paper reports on bloggers’ use of three lexical items (bias, dogma and peer review) to expose their reliance on (non-)epistemic values. Concordances and a range of visualization tools are used to gain systematic insights into the network of lexical choices that obtain around these items, and to gauge whether/how bloggers construct coherent authorial subjectivities in a bid to claim expert status and/or question the recognition of other players in the debate.

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“…Content analysis has been defined as a research methodology that objectively and systematically describes the content of a given body of communication [52]. It has been commonly used to analyze policy-related topics (e.g., [53,54]). Argument mining is a technique that identifies argumentation structures in a discourse [55].…”

Section: Control (Cont)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking the Governance of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in the COVID-19 Era

2020

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The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has been criticized for its institutional weakness. It assumed that governance commitments and the multilateral order would remain unchanged until 2030. The COVID-19 has challenged both assumptions. The response deployed by the countries has made international cooperation dependent on the solution of internal problems. What will be the impact of the pandemic on the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals? What changes can be expected in the institutional design of the Agenda to face this challenge? To address these questions we have gathered and systematized 152 documents issued by the top think tanks on International Development since the outbreak of COVID-19, to identify the main design features of the Agenda that should be modified according to the functional-rationalist approach to institutional design. Our study shows that a higher level of centralization of authority and a redefinition of control and flexibility mechanisms are needed in order to improve the governance of the Agenda. Despite the temptation of focusing on a narrow set of goals, a broad scope is recommended, necessary to safeguard its holistic approach. These findings can provide insights for addressing the governance and institutional design of other international arrangements of similar nature.

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Politicization and Polarization in Climate Change News Content, 1985-2017

Cited by 185 publications

References 43 publications

Politicization and Polarization in COVID-19 News Coverage

Politicization and Polarization in COVID-19 News Coverage

‘Is climate science taking over the science?’: A corpus-based study of competing stances on bias, dogma and expertise in the blogosphere

Rethinking the Governance of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in the COVID-19 Era

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