Donald Trump’s announcement on June 1st, 2017, to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement generated widespread news coverage. In this qualitative framing study, a selection of articles published on that topic in the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the American New York Times are analyzed with respect to generic news frames, issue-specific frames, actor-statements, and images. The most frequently used news frames were economic consequences, conflict, and responsibility. The morality frame appeared only twice, whereas the human interest frame was not evident in the verbal text at all, but occurred in one image. Two issue-specific frames emerged, the setback frame, evident in the majority of articles, cast Trump’s decision as a momentous setback for the U.S. and the global fight against climate change. The contradictory no impact frame implied that the Paris Agreement has many problems as is, and the U.S. withdrawal will have no impact on the state of the climate. The images accompanying the articles were shown to support the verbal issue-specific framing of the articles, whereas no clear relation could be found connecting certain types of actor-statements with the presence of a certain frame.

We live in a time of changing climate and global warming, creating an urgency for policy- and societal ameliorative action. Increasing climate change skepticism in the Anglo-Saxon parts of the world as well as in Europe risks delaying urgent actions needed. This thesis studies a climate skeptical blog site and network in Sweden, Klimatupplysningen, and analyzes strategies used. A comparative framing analysis is conducted where frames compiled from previous research is searched for and analyzed in a randomly selected material of 150 blog posts. The results from the research show that strategies and frames from previous research to a large extent match those in Klimatupplysningen. Two new frames appeared from the material; Media & Debate and Humor. The new frames are indicative of a contextuality of online social media as main platform for communication and networking. More research is needed on effects on audiences from blogs and other social media.