‘Hypocritical investor’ or hollywood ‘do-gooder’? A framing analysis of media and audiences negotiating Leonardo DiCaprio’s ‘green’ persona through his involvement in Formula E

ABSTRACT

Leonardo DiCaprio has a considerable track record as a fervent campaigner to save the environment and combat climate change. Drawing from his more recent activist engagements to endorse Formula E, the world’s first fully electric racing series, this contribution aims to analyse how and in what ways this generates additional exposure and appreciation for the series, the environment and DiCaprio. To this end, a qualitative and inductive framing approach is used to examine a sample of online media articles and accompanying audience comments from 2013, 2015 and 2017, resulting in a range of frames found in media coverage and audience reactions. It shows how framing of Leonardo DiCaprio is influenced by both his life story as an actor, activist and party boy, the appreciation he receives from audiences as well as by audiences’ own personal experiences with health-related issues and their conversations with peers. Finally, this contribution discusses varying tendencies by media articles and audiences to frame Leonardo DiCaprio as both hero and hypocrite as well as its wider implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Celebrity activism
• Formula E
• environmental sustainability
• framing analysis
• Leonardo DiCaprio
• online media content

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

No funding was relied on for this study.

Notes on contributors

Timothy Robeers

Timothy Robeers is a Guest Professor (Department of Communication Sciences) at Antwerp University, Belgium. He combines expertise in sport-media and celebrity culture with expertise in corporate environmental sustainability. His current research focusses on media representations of efforts by the motorsport industry to become more sustainable. He has experience in lecturing a range of (sport-) media communication courses at Antwerp University and Edinburgh University.

Hilde Van Den Bulck

Hilde Van den Bulck is the Head of the Department of Communication at Drexel University, USA. She combines expertise in media structure and policies with expertise in media culture, the latter increasingly focusing on the role of mediated communication in celebrity culture and the celebrity apparatus, in particular how celebrities’ ideas, words, and actions provoke mediated debates amongst fans, wider audiences and, in the case of celebrity activism, politicians and policy makers.