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Conflicting Climate Change Frames in a Global Field of Media Discourse

Broadbent, Jeffrey, John Sonnett, Iosef Botetzagias, Marcus Carson, Anabela Carvalho, Yu-Ju Chien, Christopher Edling, Dana Fisher, Georgios Giouzepas, Randolph Haluza-DeLay, Koichi Hasegawa, Christian Hirschi, Ana Horta, Kazuhiro Ikeda, Jun Jin, Dowan Ku, Myanna Lahsen, Ho-Ching Lee, Tze-Luen Alan Lin, Thomas Malang, Jana Ollmann, Diane Payne, Sony Pellissery, Stephan Price, Simone Pulver, Jaime Sainz, Keiichi Satoh, Clare Saunders, Luisa Schmidt, Mark C. J. Stoddart, Pradip Swarnakar, Tomoyuki Tatsumi, David Tindall, Philip Vaughter, Paul Wagner, Sun-Jin Yun, Sun Zhengyi. 2016. Conflicting Climate Change Frames in a Global Field of Media Discourse. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 2: 1–17.

Abstract

Reducing global emissions will require a global cosmopolitan culture built from detailed attention to conflicting national climate change frames (interpretations) in media discourse. The authors analyze the global field of media climate change discourse using 17 diverse cases and 131 frames. They find four main conflicting dimensions of difference: validity of climate science, scale of ecological risk, scale of climate politics, and support for mitigation policy. These dimensions yield four clusters of cases producing a fractured global field. Positive values on the dimensions show modest association with emissions reductions. Data-mining media research is needed to determine trends in this global field.

Keywords: climate change; comparative; cosmopolitan; frame conflicts; global warming

The article is available here.

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