Hartmut Wessler, Antal Wozniak, Lutz Hofer, Julia Lück
Sustainable media events? Media coverage of the UN climate conferences in democratic countries

5th European Communication Conference of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), Lisbon, November 12th to November 15th, 2014

This paper investigates the relative significance of a globalized logic of journalistic practice as compared against the impact of national context factors. We address this question by studying how the issue of climate change is framed simultaneously in news texts and images, and thus provide the first fully integrated analysis of multimodal frames. A standardized content analysis of 432 multimodal newspaper articles from five countries with differing climate change policies, discourse constellations, and journalistic cultures reveals four overarching multimodal issue frames: a global warming victims frame, a civil society demands frame, a political negotiations frame, and a sustainable energy frame. These frames constitute generalized journalistic approaches to the topic that supersede country-specific logics in framing the issue.