Transnational Problems and National Fields of Journalism: Comparing Content Diversity in U.S. and U.K. News Coverage of the Paris Climate Agreement

ABSTRACT

Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s (1993, The field of cultural production: Essays on art and literature. New York, NY: Columbia University Press., 1996, The rules of art: Genesis and structure of the literary field (S. Emanuel, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.) field theory, this study compares U.S. and U.K. news coverage of international negotiations in 2015 that culminated in the Paris agreement to curb climate change. Findings indicate commercial news outlets at times produced more diverse accounts of the negotiations than nonprofit or public-funded outlets. However, these more diverse accounts often stem from journalistic practices somewhat shielded from market pressures. A niche focus on particular aspects of the negotiations dampens content diversity at individual news outlets but increases content diversity as measured across outlets within a country, which this study finds to be higher in the U.K. These findings indicate that forms of funding resistant to market pressures and approaches to reporting diverging from legacy journalistic practices can support diverse news accounts of climate change.

KEYWORDS:

• Field theory
• journalism
• topic modeling
• content diversity
• climate change

Acknowledgements

I thank Brandon Stewart for his assistance with the stm topic modeling package used in this study and Tim Wood for his help with intercoder reliability testing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 http://www.uberlink.net

2 Associated Press, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, BuzzFeed, ABC News, BBC, Business Insider, CBS News, Climate Central, Climate Desk, Christian Science Monitor, Carbon Brief, Climate News Network, CNN, The Daily Beast, Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Democracy Now!, Financial Times, Fox News, The Guardian, Huffington Post (U.S. and U.K.), International Business Times (U.S. and U.K.), The Independent, Inside Climate News, ITV, Los Angeles Times, Mashable, Mother Jones, National Geographic, NBC News, New York Daily News, New York Magazine, New York Post, New York Times, NPR, PBS, People, Politico, ProPublica, Quartz, Reuters, Sky News, Slate, The Sun, The Telegraph, The Times, TechCrunch, Washington Post, USA Today, Vice, Vogue (U.S. and U.K.), Vox, Wall Street Journal, Yahoo!

3 The Guardian, while owned by a trust, is ad-supported and therefore included as a “commercial” news outlet.

4 Non-journalists account for 73% of Huffington Post U.S.’s manually coded content and 62% of Huffington Post U.K.’s manually coded content.

5 These paragraphs were selected because research has indicated that audiences tend to scan content rather than read it in its entirety, particularly online (Lee & Treadwell, 2013; Nielsen, 1997).

6 To reduce confusion in the text, themes are upper case and sectors are lower case.

7 Appendix A details how these indices are generated.

8 Huffington Post U.K. texts carry U.K. bylines or were prominently highlighted on the U.K. site. There is no overlap of Huffington Post U.S. and U.K. content in the corpus.

9 Chi square tests found no significant differences in topics but did find statistical significance (p < .05) for speakers, which are less tied to themes related to their own fields in digital-native outlets than in legacy outlets, and themes, with U.K. digital-native, and noncommercial outlets (partially overlapping categories) producing the Science theme at higher rates than their U.S. counterparts. U.S. and U.K. niche sites combined also produce the Science theme at a statistically significant higher rate than legacy and commercial sites. Digital-native outlets (U.S. and U.K. combined) had significantly higher rates of production of the Civil Society theme than legacy outlets. Commercial sites (U.S. and U.K. combined) had significantly higher rates of Economics theme production than noncommercial outlets.

10 Testing verifies that if Carbon Brief had a higher internal diversity index, the U.K.’s external diversity index would decrease.

11 Huffington Post ended this practice in 2018, but for analysis see Hays (2018) and Bakker (2012).