Climate Change Coverage in British Newspapers

Mediedekning av klimadebatten er tema for vinneren av Ungdomskonkurransen Fritt Ord 2010.

Kjer­sti Skaaraaen Her­berg fra Gjøvik videregående skole vant førsteprisen i Ung­dom­skonkur­ransen Fritt Ord 2010 med bidraget “Cli­mate Change Cov­er­age in British News­pa­pers”. Vox Pub­li­ca pre­sen­ter­er her det kon­klud­erende avs­nit­tet i Her­bergs arbeid. Du kan også laste ned bidraget i sin hel­het (pdf).

Conclusion

The con­clu­sion is that although there are some sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences, The Dai­ly Mail and The Dai­ly Tele­graph deal with the issue glob­al cli­mate change rather sim­i­lar­ly, and that both are rather sceptical.

The Telegraph’s cov­er­age seems more scep­ti­cal towards the exis­tence of cli­mate change than the Mail’s, although it is the case for both that the pro­por­tion of scep­ti­cal arti­cles is larg­er than the pro­por­tion of sci­en­tists that are so. This must be seen in con­nec­tion both with tar­get group and polit­i­cal alle­giance. The Tele­graph has an enquir­ing approach, sup­pos­ed­ly because that is the way it wish­es to sell itself. The Mail’s ten­den­cy to exag­ger­ate may also part­ly be explained with the newspaper’s gen­er­al journalism.

Both news­pa­pers take the indi­vid­ual British citizen’s point of view in mat­ters like tax increas­es, because this is coher­ent with the reader’s opin­ions and inter­ests. How­ev­er, this is to a greater extent the case in the Mail than in the Tele­graph, pos­si­bly due to dif­fer­ent tar­get groups and news­pa­per cat­e­gories. Anoth­er sig­nif­i­cant obser­va­tion is that espe­cial­ly the Mail focus­es large­ly on celebri­ties, pre­sum­ably due to news val­ues, the news­pa­per cat­e­go­ry and, to a cer­tain extent, cul­tur­al aspects.

These find­ings have been shown like­ly to be the result of con­scious jour­nal­ism and inten­tion­al edi­to­r­i­al deci­sions. Since the essay only con­sid­ers two news­pa­pers over a lim­it­ed time-peri­od, gen­er­al­iz­ing the find­ings to apply to all con­ser­v­a­tive broad­sheet and tabloid news­pa­pers is inap­pro­pri­ate. Nev­er­the­less, the inves­ti­ga­tion serves as an indi­ca­tor of British news­pa­pers’ cov­er­age of cli­mate change.

TEMA

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