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Abstract
We examine climate change news coverage from 1997 to 2010 in two Canadian national newspapers: the Globe and Mail and the National Post. The following questions guide our analysis: Why did the volume of climate change coverage rise and fall during the period? Focusing on the key period of 2007–2008, what kinds of issue categories, thematic frames, and rhetorical frames dominate the news discourse? Canadian news coverage of climate change is characterized by a series of peaks and troughs, combined with an overall increase in coverage. The volume of coverage appears to be primarily driven by national and international political events, more than by changes to national or global carbon emissions, or by other ecological factors. The Canadian news discourse about climate change is dominated by themes of government responsibility, policymaking, policy measures for mitigation, and ways to mitigate climate change.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Jeffrey Broadbent and Philip Leifeld for their feedback throughout the development of this research. The authors also acknowledge the assistance of Jackson McLean and Kelly Hunter on this project.
Notes
The term “rhetorical frame” is potentially problematic, as all frames may have an explicit or implicit rhetorical dimension. However, we retain the term because it is used in the common protocols across COMPON cases, and because explicitly rhetorical argument is highlighted here more than in coding for thematic frames or issue categories.
A separate analysis of our data, which focuses on which organizational actors appear as news sources, shows that Federal government, opposition party, and provincial government news sources are highly visible in Canadian news coverage. These findings are not the focus of our present analysis, but are reported elsewhere.