Competing Crises? Media Coverage and Framing of Climate Change During the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic emerged against the backdrop of the longer-term climate change crisis and increasing global awareness of the imperative for climate action, disrupting the post-Paris trajectory of climate policy and media coverage of climate change. We examine news media coverage from Canadian legacy newspapers and answer three questions. First, did the COVID-19 pandemic work as a critical event in its impacts on news media coverage of climate change, and if so, in what ways? Second, did media framing of climate change shift in response to this critical event, and if so, in what ways? Third, are there notable differences between national and subnational media frames? We find that COVID-19 is a critical event linked to a period of reduced media coverage of climate change. However, this critical event also opened new spaces for news framing that connects environmental and economic dimensions of sustainability.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• media
• framing
• COVID-19
• Canada

Acknowledgments

We thank Yixi Yang for her research assistance on this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The analysis of level of media coverage presented in Figures 1 and 2 is based on hard codes (e.g., keyword searches). As such, coder reliability is not an issue (Krippendorff, 2018).

2 Using frequency counts of qualitative data — even for relatively small numbers — is a commonly applied and useful tool for frame analysis (for example, see: Dreher & Voyer, 2015; Hestres, 2018; Nisbet & Lewenstein, 2002). As the quantification of our data is based in inductive coding and qualitative data analysis, we do not undertake statistical analysis of these descriptive frequencies. Further, we are cautious about over-interpreting these small-number differences.

3 We acknowledge that much of the information visualized in this figure might also be represented in a table and that analyses of media outlets and themes has a long tradition in content analysis. However, discourse network analysis (DNA) is useful because it provides a high-level visual overview of multi-dimensional connections between two modes of data. DNA emphasizes relationality between cultural frames and social actors that may be less apparent when data are presented in either tabular or narrative form. Over the past several years, a growing number of media framing and policy network studies have adopted DNA as an approach. For an overview see Leifeld (2017, 2020); for a prior application of DNA to climate change media coverage in this journal see Stoddart et al. 2017a.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ocean Frontier Institute through the project Future Ocean and Coastal Infrastructures.