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Media Coverage of International Climate Change Policy • Chandra Lal Pandey and Priya A

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Media Coverage of International Climate Change Policy • Chandra Lal Pandey and Priya A The Media and the Major Emitters: Media Coverage of International Climate Change Policy • Chandra Lal Pandey and Priya A. Kurian* Abstract News media outlets are crucial for the dissemination of information on climate change issues, but the nature of the coverage varies across the world, depending on local geo- political and economic contexts. Despite extensive scholarship on media and climate change, less attention has been paid to comparing how climate change is reported by news media in developed and developing countries. This article undertakes a cross- national study of how elite newspapers in four major greenhouse gas emitting countries— the United States, the United Kingdom, China and India—frame coverage of climate change negotiations. We show that framing is similar by these newspapers in developing countries, but there are clear differences in framing in the developed world, and between the developed and developing countries. While an overwhelming majority of these news stories and the frames they deploy are pegged to the stance of domestic institutions in the developing countries, news frames from developed countries are more varied. Despite the overwhelming scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic cli- mate change and the threat it poses to the planet, international policy responses— most notably in the form of a global climate treaty—remain fragmented and inadequate. The on-going negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are marked by a fundamental dis- juncture between current geopolitical, economic, and environmental realities and the relevance of “a regime forged in another era” (Grubb 2014, 325). Much of the disconnect between the stark ecological and scientific reality, on the one hand, and the inadequate political and policy responses, on the other, has been driven by the coming together of a powerful alliance of a fossil fuel industry that funds climate denialism, a small but vocal minority of contrarian scientists, and a news media committed to the norm of “balanced reporting” (Boykoff and * We thank the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Waikato for financial support to Chandra Lal Pandey for his postdoctoral fellowship. We also thank our colleague Alan Simpson for his support and invaluable contribution to this paper, as well as the editors of Global Environmental Politics, Kate O’Neill and Stacy D. VanDeveer, and anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments. Global Environmental Politics 17:4, November 2017, doi:10.1162/GLEP_a_00430 © 2017 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 67 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GLEP_a_00430 by guest on 02 October 2021 68 • The Media and the Major Emitters Boykoff 2004; Oreskes and Conway 2010). At a more fundamental level, the failure of political consensus also reflects a lack of public confidence and trust in the scientific community and institutions, and therefore requires a response that is sensitive to “the performative and persuasive demands of reasoning for culturally diverse audiences” (Jasanoff 2013, 131). As has been widely acknowledged, the media play a critical role in com- municating the importance of climate change and the need for appropriate pol- icy responses (Boykoff and Boykoff 2004; Cooper 2011). However, journalistic norms can “often mitigate against meaningful, accurate, and urgent coverage of the issue of global warming” (Boykoff and Boykoff 2004, 125). Previous social science research has explored media representations of climate change pri- marily in developed countries, including comparative analyses across two or more states (Brossard et al. 2004; Grundmann and Scott 2014; Jaspal and Nerlich 2014; Nisbet 2009; Painter and Ashe 2012). Significantly less attention has been given to the news media’s role in shaping the climate policy agenda in developing countries, and particularly to comparing the news media across de- veloped and developing countries. This article undertakes a comparative analysis of the coverage of international climate policy issues by the news media in four major greenhouse gas (GHG) emitting countries, two each from the developing and developed worlds. Background Studies on media effects have vividly demonstrated the nature and extent of public reliance on the media for information on issues of public concern (Dautrich and Hartley 1999; Johnson-Cartee 2005). The media, thus, play a key role in shaping public understanding of such issues, including climate change (Asayama and Ishii 2014; Boykoff 2011; Cooper 2011; Nerlich 2010; Wilson 1995). The English-language press coverage of climate change has tended to focus on scien- tific research and commentary, especially in the US and the UK (Antilla 2005; Carvalho 2007; Dunlap et al. 2016; Kuha 2009; Grundmann and Scott 2014). Grundmann and Scott (2014) explored media coverage of climate change dis- courses, using corpus linguistic methods, in four developed countries—Germany, France, the UK and the US—and found that climate advocates had much greater visibility than skeptics in all four countries. Some studies have examined media coverage of climate change in other English-speaking countries including Australia, Canada and New Zealand (Bell 1994; Einsiedel 1992; Henderson- Sellers 1998; McManus 2000; Takahashi 2008), whereas others have focused on France, Spain, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Japan (Dirikx and Gelders 2010; Lopera and Moreno 2014; Shehata and Hopmann 2012). Painter and Ashe (2012) examined media coverage of climate skepticism in the US, UK, Brazil, China, France and India and found that news coverage of skepticism is primarily limited to the US and the UK. But, on the whole, there is limited schol- arly analysis of the media coverage of climate change in the emerging economies Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GLEP_a_00430 by guest on 02 October 2021 Chandra Lal Pandey and Priya A. Kurian • 69 of Brazil, Russia, China, and India despite the pivotal roles of these countries in international climate change policy negotiations (Billett 2010; Painter and Ashe 2012). Furthermore, with some notable exceptions, little scholarly attention has been directed at a cross-national assessment of the framing of climate policy issues by the news media and the potential impact of these framings on shaping international climate policy (Stromback and van Aelst 2010; Schmidt et al. 2013; Takahashi, 2008). Dirikx and Gelders (2010, 733), among others, have called for “[m]ore cross-national analyses of climate change media coverage to discover similarities and dissimilarities in the climate change information that people in various countries receive” (Benson 2004). This article evaluates the ways in which the media have framed the discussions around communicating issues of inter- national climate change policy-making, ranging from the barriers confronting international climate negotiations to the potential paths forward, with specific reference to print media in the US, the UK, China and India. Such an analysis is important in determining how climate change science and negotiations have been portrayed by the leading prestige or elite newspapers (Boykoff and Boykoff 2004; Carpenter 2007) from both developed and developing countries that are also the major emitters, which has implications for public understanding of cli- mate change as well as for the nature of political negotiations in these countries. Framework of Analysis Drawing on a textual analysis of media frames (de Vreese 2005; Entman 1993; McCright and Dunlap 2000; Semetko and Valkenburg 2000), this article provides a cross-national analysis of the media coverage of international climate policy negotiations by eight “prestige press” or “elite newspapers” from four countries between 2007 and 2013. Gitlin (1980, 7) defines a “frame” as “persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, of selection, emphasis and exclu- sion by which symbol handlers routinely organize discourse.” Frames are the interpretive packages and at the core of the interpretive package is “a central orga- nizing idea … for making sense of relevant events, suggesting what is at issue” (Gamson and Modigliani 1989, 4). Frames can be generic or issue specific (de Vreese 2005). Explicitly or implicitly, frames emphasize aspects of complex issues such as climate change to make it possible for the public to determine read- ily why an issue is important, who is responsible, and what the consequences might be (McCombs et al. 1997). Frames thus “become invaluable tools for presenting relatively complex issues, such as stem cell research” or climate change, “efficiently and in a way that makes them accessible to lay audiences because they play to existing cog- nitive schemas” (Scheufele and Tewksbury 2007, 12). An analysis of framing does not focus on which topics or issues are selected for coverage by the news media, but instead on the particular ways those issues are presented (Price and Tewksbury 1997). McCombs (2004) argues that framing is simply a more Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GLEP_a_00430 by guest on 02 October 2021 70 • The Media and the Major Emitters refined version of agenda setting. From that perspective, framing means making aspects of an issue more salient through different modes of presentation to shift people’s attitudes (Scheufele and Tewksbury 2007). Framing offers a powerful discursive strategy for presenting and defining an issue in
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