Moral Themes in Global Climate Change News Coverage?

The fourth speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Ao Wu, presenting a moral spectrum analysis of the ‘carbon’ issue in the Global News Database. There is plenty of transnational communication about climate change-related issues, including the push for carbon neutrality, but the interests and positions of different countries vary widely, and exhibit complex value logics that might be analysed through moral foundation theory. This theory introduces five dimensions: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. For environmental issues, these might be integrated into three broader categories: pragmatism/idealism, responsibility/profit, innovation/conservation.

These might be analysed especially in constructive journalism content that seeks solutions to the climate change crisis; how has such journalism evolved over time, and how has the presentation of specific stakeholders and other relevant entities in such reporting changed? How are moral judgments distributed throughout such coverage?

Changes were fastest in European countries’ journalism, and slowest in African journalism. This is based on data drawn from the Meltwater news database between 2015 and 2023, searching for the keyword ‘carbon neutrality’ in six languages, engaging in multilingual named entity recognition and moral language analysis. News coverage rose substantially since the 2015 Paris agreement, and there were clear differences in then journalistic coverage between countries that moved faster or slower in implementing their commitments to carbon neutrality. (There is more detail here, but he’s run out of time and is now rushing through the results.)