2011 - Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences ...

Maxwell Boykoff
Making Sense of Media Representations
of Climate Change
Media representations—from
news to
entertainment—provide
critical links between the
everyday realities of how
people experience climate
change and the ways in
which these are discussed
between science and policy
actors. Clearly, activities
in climate science and
politics have provided
content and characters for
the media to cover. But
perhaps more subtly, media
representations have,
in turn, shaped ongoing
scientific and political
considerations, decisions
and activities. In
other words, mass media have influenced how issues are
taken into account, who has a say and how. This research
has analyzed how a burgeoning array of ‘actors,’ ‘agents
of definition’ and ‘claims makers’ in these spaces have
created, contested, negotiated and reconfigured climate
science and policy discourses and actions over time.
Many dynamic, nonlinear and complex factors contribute
to how media outlets portray various facets of climate
change. Swirling contextual factors as well as competing
journalistic pressures and norms contribute to how issues,
events and information have often become climate ‘news.’
Such challenges have contributed to critical misperceptions,
misleading debates and divergent understandings
that are detrimental to efforts that seek to enlarge rather
than constrict the spectrum of possibility for responses to
climate challenges.
This research is situated in wider ‘cultural politics of
climate change,’ where formal climate science and governance
link with daily activities in the public sphere. It is
important to examine ‘how’ media representations have
been negotiated over time and space, through relations of
power and inequalities of access and resources, thereby
influencing climate action.
World newspaper coverage of climate change, as well
as U.S., United Kingdom and India country-level monitoring
of climate coverage, are updated each month here:
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/media_coverage/.
CIRES Annual Report 2011 27