Communicating Climate Change: Content analysis of British and Russian website coverage of climate change

Abstract

The issue of climate change is central to contemporary society. As our reliance on the media is constantly growing, media plays a crucial role of forming society’s perception of climate change and is often deemed to be responsible for lack of action among people in order to improve situation and reduce emission of carbon dioxide. Thus, it is of extreme importance to find out how media communicates climate change to its audience and whether any changes in the way they cover this issue should be made. The main focus of this study is to find out how British and Russian news websites cover the issue of climate change. The analysis of balanced reporting, framing and linguistic repertoires revealed that the media is still sending mixed messages regarding climate change to its audiences. The analysis revealed, that contrary to the previous research, the use of linguistic repertoires has not improved. Despite a number of similarities regarding coverage practices employed by the two websites, some significant differences were noticed as well.