Adame Bradley J, Corman Steven R, Endres Carsyn J, Farmer Rowdy Dale, Awonuga Tumininu
Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, United States; Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, United States; Center for Strategic Communication, United States.
Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, United States.
J Environ Manage. 2025 Feb;375:124159. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2025.124159. Epub 2025 Jan 25.
This paper reports a theoretically-driven quantitative content analysis of news media discourse on climate change, its effects, and solutions to understand how US news discourse differs from widely supported scientific conclusions on global climate. Despite the dire warnings and calls to action, US public opinion on the causes and solutions to climate change remain divided. In the global context, the US's split views are anomalous and may be an artifact of the US media's coverage of the climate crisis. Anthropogenic climate change represents one of the most significant threats to our planet. Framed by Vested Interest Theory (VIT), we coded a representative sample of news discourse according to VIT's constituent variables. News sources were selected according to partisan orientation and balanced across the political divide. News articles were parsed into single sentences with source and ordering was randomized for presentation auto human coders. This allowed us to code at a granular level. Results show that not all five variables are equally present, with salience, response-efficacy, and certainty being most frequently referenced. While patterns also reflect a significant partisan divide, we also found unexpected non-linear patterns in the discourse, likely due to the rhetorical style of the sources' reporting. Overall, we conclude that climate change reporting does not reflect the scientific discourse, and that this likely fuels the idiosyncratic American debate on climate change, and its effects and solutions.
本文报告了一项基于理论驱动的对新闻媒体关于气候变化、其影响及解决方案的话语进行的定量内容分析，以了解美国新闻话语与关于全球气候的广泛支持的科学结论有何不同。尽管有严峻的警告和行动呼吁，但美国公众对气候变化的成因及解决方案的看法仍然存在分歧。在全球背景下，美国的分裂观点是反常的，可能是美国媒体对气候危机报道的产物。人为气候变化是我们星球面临的最重大威胁之一。以既得利益理论（VIT）为框架，我们根据VIT的构成变量对新闻话语的代表性样本进行了编码。新闻来源根据党派倾向进行选择，并在政治分歧中保持平衡。新闻文章被解析为单句，并带有来源，且顺序随机化以供人工编码员呈现。这使我们能够在细粒度层面进行编码。结果表明，并非所有五个变量都同样存在，其中显著性、响应效能和确定性被提及的频率最高。虽然模式也反映出显著的党派分歧，但我们在话语中也发现了意想不到的非线性模式，这可能是由于来源报道的修辞风格所致。总体而言，我们得出结论，气候变化报道并未反映科学话语，而这可能助长了美国关于气候变化及其影响和解决方案的独特辩论。
