Climate change is an acute global question in need of media attention as the impacts often are scattered and distant around our planet. An ambition to generate insight and information about its nature can be questioned for the indirect consequence it might have on the consumers of news. Through framing different narratives concerning climate change reaches the public minds and affects the way people act upon the situation. As the theory states, from Witte (1992), when much information is handed about a problem with lacking information about solutions, people react through maladaptive responses, engaging in fear control rather than taking control over the threat. This study investigates through a quantitative and qualitative content analysis the framing of climate change in five Swedish newspapers; Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, Västerbottens-Kuriren and Nya Wermlands-Tidningen. Attention is paid to the elements of frames and the relationship between information given about problems, causes, evaluations and solutions. The findings of the study shows that the main dominating frames were Conflict and strategy and Public responsibility and governance, a result perhaps akin to the time period of the study, with focus set to before and after the 2018 Swedish general election. Both of these frames, Conflict and strategy and Public responsibility, have been found in previous research appearing as dominating narratives in similar political periods where climate change is being discussed. Moreover, the result shows that definition of problems had twice as big presence in the material as suggested remedies. This finding suggests that the existing excess of information about problems might affect people’s perception of climate change in a way that generates maladaptive responses.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-191506 |
| Date | January 2020 |
| Creators | Svensson, Jens |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, JMK |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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