The Framing of Disruptive and Non-Disruptive Climate Protests in the German News Media

The next speaker at the final P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference session is the excellent Helena Rauxloh, with a paper on radical climate protests. Just recently, for example, the Just Stop Oil protest group recently defaced the Stonehenge standing stones, and received some very negative news headlines for this action – yet many of the headlines covering these protests did not even identify what these protests were about. Such radical protests can be compared against more conventional and largely non-disruptive protests like Fridays for Future.

These protests engage with journalism as an arena for and driver of polarisation. Disruptive protests may encourage disrupted debates, which in turn may drive discursive polarisation; this is especially so if the news coverage seeks to delegitimise the protest group’s action, or even the central cause that the protest addresses.

Discursive polarisation then looks especially at the divergence of patterns of discussion in public debates, and may incorporate both issue and ideological polarisation as well as affective polarisation – which are expressed respectively in the polarised framing of issues and in polarised content related to specific groups.

This was assessed by the current study by examining news coverage of the mainstream Fridays for Future and radical Letzte Generation protest groups in Germany for the key frames as well as the levels of affect (anger, fear, and toxicity) in such coverage. ‘Frames’ here mainly means an analysis of the major keywords associated with both or with only one of the two groups, and while these are not frames in the conventional sense they still represent the discursive context in which these groups are discussed.

Three broad frames emerged from this analysis: global climate justice, extremism, and legal issue. Most typical frames for Fridays for Future were located between climate justice and extremism, and for Letzte Generation between extremism and legality, across all news sources; this represents an asymmetrical polarisation in the reporting about these groups.

Further analysis of toxicity and emotions (centrally, anger and fear) in such coverage showed relatively low level of toxicity and moderated levels of anger for Fridays for Future, except amongst a small number of far-right news outlets which scored higher on both; and higher levels of anger and sometimes higher levels of toxicity for Letzte Generation, where the coverage even by moderate news outlets resembled the coverage of far-right outlets of Fridays for Future. This again points to asymmetrical discursive polarisation.

But this should not mean that we should fundamentally argue against disruptive protests; rather, it perhaps tells us a great deal about the preferences and worldviews of journalists as they cover the news and choose the frames they use as they do so.