Imagining the Future at the Global and National Scale: A Comparative Study of British and Dutch Press Coverage of Rio 1992 and Rio 2012

Abstract

Climate change and imagined futures are intricately linked, discussed by policy-makers and reported in the media. In this article we focus on the construction of future expectations in the press coverage of the 1992 and 2012 United Nations conferences in Rio de Janeiro in British and Dutch national newspapers. We use a novel combination of methods, semantic co-word networks and metaphor analysis, to study imagined futures. Our findings show that between 1992 and 2012 there was an overall shift from future-oriented hope to past-oriented disappointment regarding implementing international agreements on climate change policy, but with subtle and interesting differences between the UK and The Netherlands. Certain national differences seem to be stable over time and are indicative of rather dissimilar policy cultures in two nations which are geographically quite close.

Keywords:

• climate change
• newspapers
• semantics
• metaphors
• Rio
• media

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by The Netherlands Scientific Organization, NWO, grant number [NWO-ORA 464-10-077] and The Economic and Social Research Council, ESRC, grant number [RES-360-25-0068].

Notes

1. The Rio 1992 Earth Summit took place, officially from 3 to 14 June 1992, but the first week consists of preparation of the actual meeting taking place between 11and 13 June 1992. We also conducted semantic maps analysis on 7 days preceding the meetings in both countries and both years. However, the three days during the meetings were most illuminating for our purposes, since the press in The Netherlands hardly covered the meeting a week before the starting of the meeting—publishing only 7 and 9 news items in 1992 and 2012, respectively, as compared to 45 and 62 news items published in the UK national press in the same time period. This difference in the number of news items in the two countries makes it impossible to compare the UK and Dutch coverage before the meeting. The number of news items during the actual meetings was almost equal in both 1992 and 2012 coverage in the two countries.

2. In order to focus on the national coverage of the two Rio meetings, we included all the national newspapers covering the 2012 meeting instead of restricting the analysis on only those newspapers that covered the 1992 meeting. Hence, our analysis represents the whole overall attention to the meetings, and the content in the newspapers.

3. The procedure for co-word maps is as follows: The headlines of the news items were saved as a text.txt document, and a word frequency list, words.txt, was created using TextStat open software tool (http://www.niederlandistik.fu-berlin.de/textstat/). A stopword list of common words with little semantic relevance, such as “the,” “he,” and “with,” was compiled to the file stopword.txt to be removed from the analysis, and saved in the same folder with the text.txt and words.txt. Plural s was automatically removed (e.g., the words “car” and “cars” were stemmed into the single word, “car”).The routine calculates the co-occurrences of the headline words in the set of all the headlines, and automatically constructs matrices of words versus documents that result both in relational co-occurrence matrices and positional cosine normalized matrices (Egghe & Leydesdorff, 2009), using Salton's Index (Salton & McGill, 1987). While the analysis was conducted using ti.exe program, Pajek was used for the visualization of the cosine.dat file. (For more information on the ti-exe routine, see Vlieger & Leydesdorff, 2010).

4. The cosine is formulated as follows:

Where x_i and y_i refer to the score of the ith row (e.g., document) in column x or y (e.g., different words).

5. All translations from Dutch to English are our own translations.

6. The increase in the number of newspaper reporting on the Rio meeting in 2012 means increased amount of attention to the issue. Since we were interested in the media responses by national newspapers in the two moments in time, we included all national newspapers in 1992 and 2012.