Editorial Choices in Covering Climate Change on French Political Media and Blogs

Gothenburg.
And Mathieu Simonson is back for a second presentation in this AoIR 2010 session, examining how the editorial choices and sourcing practices of major French newspapers Le Monde and Le Figaro compare with those of participatory political blogging / citizen journalism platforms Agora Vox and Rue 89. The case study here is their coverage of the Copenhagen summit on climate change (COP15). This involved some 214 articles across the four platforms.

Traditional platforms focussed on negotiations (35%), education and sensibilisation (22%), and demonstrations, protests and militants (14%); participatory platforms similarly focussed on negotiations (30%), climate science (22%), and ideology (12%). Sources that were used by both sides included press agencies (almost exclusively on traditional platforms); officials and government sources, especially for traditional platforms; and mass media coverage, especially for the participatory media platforms – however, such citations were not always uncritical, of course.

In terms of scientific sources, the participatory platforms quoted a larger variety of sources (including a large number of climate sceptics and other marginal groups – the more conservative Agora Vox presenting them in some part as acceptable sources); in the traditional media, a large number of quotations came from the IPCC, which were presented without criticism. In participatory platforms, the sources cited were sometimes also somewhat further removed from the immediate climate change debate – drawing instead on more general free-market thinkers, for example (this might reflect underlying biases of the major contributors).

Further speech act analysis shows a range of uses: assertives (declaring statements to be proven vs. unproven, likely vs. unlikely), directives (encouraging the audience to take an active by stating what actions were forbidden vs. mandatory, permitted vs. optional), commissives (where authors make promises, commitments – found especially in Agora Vox), expressives (where authors express their personal feelings – especially in the participatory media sites), and declaratives (where authors provide framing of events, for example as a historical moment – especially in the traditional media – or a media circus – especially in Agora Vox).

Participatory media quote mass media as well as a large variety of marginal sources, then. The mere identification of central issues and actors establishes specific frameworks of understanding that favour the expression of particular viewpoints. Participatory media also assume a higher degree of subjectivity, and there are also internal differences in how these sites address specific questions, depending on their own political orientation and self-understanding.