Polarised Media Framing of Climate Protests in Germany and Australia

Up next in this ICA 2024 conference session is my excellent QUT colleague Katharina Esau, presenting a study on the news media framing of both mainstream and more disruptive climate protests in Germany and Australia. This included both the peaceful protests Fridays for Future and School Strike for Climate as well as well as the actions of Letzte Generation and Extinction Rebellion that blocked traffic and staged symbolic protests in art galleries.

Here are the slides, and the liveblog continues below:

How the news media frame such protests matters. Frames influence public opinion and policy-makers, and policy-makers also seek to influence media framing – but media frames are difficult to investigate both qualitatively and quantitatively. Key questions here include whether there are problem statements, identified causes, blame attribution, proposed solutions, and other aspects.

How these frames are then used by different news media also points to possible patterns of polarisation in the media landscape: diverging uses of frames in news coverage might point to diverging underlying editorial viewpoints and ideologies. This project collected news media data from 19 Australian and 21 German news media outlets from 2019 to 2023, then, and captured some 3,200 Australian and 6,600 German news articles referring to these protest movements.

Terms associated with these protest movements diverged considerably between coverage of disruptive and less disruptive protest movements in both countries, with more extreme language used about disruptive movements (but the nature of that language differed across the two countries); coverage of disruptive protests also contained more anger and toxicity (but some far-right outlets in Germany and in Australia were also toxic about Fridays for Future).

From the key terms used, three broad potential frames emerged: a crime and legality frame, an extremism frame, and a global climate justice frame (though for now they are really only collections of keywords that still need to be fully verified as frames in a narrower sense). In Germany, Fridays for Future was framed between global climate justice and extremism, in Australia, mostly as global climate justice; in Germany, Letzte Generation between crime and legality and extremism, in Australia, mostly as extremism.

So, more anger and toxicity and an extremist framing for disruptive protest in both countries; more neutral coverage and a climate justice frame for less disruptive protests. This might point to the existence of polarisation in both countries, though it still needs to be established whether such polarisation is in fact problematic.