ECREA16-Abstract

580

Saturday, November 12

1 1 : 0 0 – 1 2 : 3 0

SCI05

Media and Environmental Challenges

PP 636

How Climate Change Gets Vivid – A Visual Analysis of the German TV Coverage on the United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) 2013,

2014 and 2015

B. Bigl

University of Leipzig, Institute for Communication and Media Studies, Leipzig, Germany

We conducted a quantitative visual content analysis (Lobinger, 2012; Geise & Rössler, 2012; van Leeuwen, 2001) about the German media coverage on

the supreme decision-making body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2013, 2014 and 2015. The aim of our

study is to describe how climate change is visualized during the Conference of Parties (COP) compared to the environmental coverage on climate change in

general. We investigate, if the coverage during the COPs discontinues or even disrupts the way how media stress a rather abstract issue. In 2013, the Inter‑

governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has reached consensus about scientific evidence that climate change is anthropogenic (Pearce et al., 2014). In

general, the media play a central role in shaping and changing how environmental issues are made a subject of discussion (Bruckner & Zickfeld, 2008; Cox,

2010; Hansen, 2014;Weber, 2008). Especially the Conference of the Parties (COP) got special media attention in the past (Mahony, 2013). According to Dun‑

woody and Peters (1992), the mass media seem to mirror especially political and social processes. Recent studies showed that (catastrophic) weather and

climate characteristics are no important drivers for attention, instead, international climate summits have stronger impacts (Schäfer, Ivanova & Schmidt,

2014). Especially during former COPs, the coverage was dominated by political elite actors (Boykoff, 2012) struggling for an agreement on reducing carbon

dioxide emissions. Moreover, the coverage on the rather abstract issue“climate change”differs in how it is discussed and presented (Ermolaeva, 2013; Lester,

2009). In general, the strength of television is to provide the public both with pictures of political drama and of horrifying environmental catastrophes which

both set the audience under pressure for action (Beck, 2009). During the COPs, we want to argue, coverage on climate change gets critical in terms of dra‑

matization. Our main research questions were: RQ1: How is climate change visualized (e.g. images, actors, topics) in the major newscasts in the German

TV during the COP 2013, 2014 and 2015? RQ2: Is the visualization during the COPs coherent over time compared to the general environmental coverage on

climate change or does the coverage break the main lines of argumentation? In order to address these questions, we recorded the major newscasts of five

TV stations (ARD, ZDF, RTL, Sat1, and Pro7) from 2013 to 2015 on the basis of artificial weeks (total of N=299 (6%)). Of these N=73 (24%) are relevant

newscasts i.e. referring to climate change. We also recorded the major newscasts of these TV stations (N=210) during the COP19 (Warszawa, 2013), COP20

(Lima, 2014) and COP21 (Paris, 2015). In the ongoing analysis, we expect a discontinuity in how climate change is visualized during the conferences com‑

pared to the general climate change coverage . Because of the media attention during the COPs, we assume that the coverage during the conferences is

dominated both by stereotypical images referring to catastrophically environmental events in the past and images visualizing the drama of elite politics .

PP 637

New Players in the Provision of Science and Environment Information – A Case Study of the Coverage of the Paris COP21 Summit

J. Painter

, C. Howarth

, S. Kristiansen

Reuters Institute- Oxford University, Politics and International Relations, Oxford, United Kingdom

Anglia Ruskin University, Global Sustainability Institute, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Universität Zürich, IPMZ - Institut für Publizistikwissenschaft und Medienforschung, Zurich, Switzerland

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) at Oxford University is coordinating research in six countries (France, Germany, Poland, Spain, the UK

and the USA) on the provision, content and consumption of information about the environment provided by new media players, including BuzzFeed, Vice

and Huffington Post, compared to that by legacy (traditional) and niche (specialist) players. Data collected from over 30,000 users in 18 countries for the RISJ

Digital News Reports show that these three new players are particularly used by younger aged groups (18–34) as favoured sources for news consumption.

Huffington Post was one of the first‘digital natives’which has now established itself a major player in a number of countries. BuzzFeed has doubled its reach

in the UK and the USA over the last year, and has established a strong foothold in in several countries amongst the young. It has overtaken the New York

Times and the Washington Post for its number of digital page views. Vice is another new web-only digital player with a focus on video content. All three

give editorial priority to covering environmental issues. The study includes three areas of research: 1. Provision: How much resources and editorial priority

do these new players assign to coverage of science and environment issues? 2. Content: How does the volume of coverage of these issues by the new players

compare to other topics, and how does this relative distribution of coverage compare to legacy media? Are there significant differences in the content of cov‑

erage between legacy and new players? 3. C

onsumption:What

do we know about the consumption of news on these topics by different demographics, and

the trust they have in the information? The research includes a case study of the coverage of the UN summit in Paris on climate change in December 2015,

with a particular focus on the three new players mentioned above, two examples of legacy media (for example, the Guardian andTelegraph online) and one

niche player (for example, Carbon Brief). This paper will present results from content analysis of more than 600 articles on the following areas of difference

between legacy and new players, including volume of coverage, modalities (text, photos, videos), content (main themes), sources quoted, and tone. Sub-

themes include the presence or absence of sceptical voices, the presentation of the conclusion of the summit as a success or failure, and country differences.

The results presented will focus on the UK, the USA and Germany. The value of this research lies in the originality of detailed examination of the coverage

of environmental issues by new players. There is some published research on new digital players (such as Lucy Kung, 'Innovators in Digital News', RISJ/IB

Tauris 2015), but very little providing content analysis of their news coverage in general, or of the environment in particular.