American and Dutch media coverage of the competing claims in the climate change debate: A reflection of political polarization?
Year: 2017
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This study addresses the debate on climate change in 1997, the year of the Kyoto Convention on Climate Change, in the United States (US) and the Netherlands.Within this debate there are many different claims that all compete for the most attention, support and credibility.Broadly speaking, these claims either support the mainstream climate science, are skeptical of this climate science or offer moderate support to parts of certain claims on both sides and combine these to find possible solutions.One way for these claims to achieve this attention is through the mass media, who can be an influential actor in giving salience to claims by covering them in their media output.The competition between these different claims has in some countries, especially in those with a two-party political system such as the US, led to a polarization in the politics on climate change, which has made it very difficult to form policy on the matter.This research examines whether the coverage of the major elite newspapers reflected this absence or presence of polarization in both countries by coding through content analysis of eighty articles which claims and actors were mentioned most in both the different newspapers and the different countries.The results from this research showed that indeed the different groups of claims were mentioned more evenly in the Netherlands than in the United States with a clearer difference as well between the newspapers in the US than between those in the Netherlands.
Author: Dooren, Esther van
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7017398376