Supervisors: Irene Pollach & John Thøgersen
Discussants: Jakob Arnoldi & Claus Holm

Abstract
This PhD project investigates how the news media constructs narratives about climate change responsibility – specifically, how they assign responsibility for climate change causes, consequences and solutions to different actors, especially consumers and companies.

Previous research on climate change news coverage has studied news volumes (Barkemeyer et al., 2017; Meier & Eskjær, 2024), discourses (Boykoff, 2008; Gillings & Dayrell, 2023) and frames, where scholars examine themes in news coverage and their potential effects (Nisbet, 2009; O'Neill et al., 2015; Stecula & Merkley, 2019).

Framing as an analytical tool is widely used in media research but varies significantly in its application and definitions, making it difficult to find coherence in the frames used in climate change coverage. These frames typically cover broad themes, which tell us very little about the constructive nature of news and the actual stories presented. News articles with the same frame can present the same topic very differently.

Based on approximately 2,000 news articles on climate change covering the period 2000-2023, from newspapers in Denmark, England and the United States, this PhD project seeks to develop a novel analytical framework for news articles. It draws on narrative theory to capture connections between actions, events and characters in the news stories, thereby deepening the analytical focus of news studies on climate change. Providing more detail about actions and participants - than just thematic frames - helps capture the structure of narratives in a way that is comparable across news articles and can tell us more about how news shape public discourse on climate change. This framework will be used for a comparative study of the mediation of climate change responsibility over time and across countries.

This first-year presentation will focus on the data collection and analysis of data for the first paper.

Everyone is welcome!