Someone Else's Problem: The Framing of Climate Change Politics in The Irish Times, The Guardian and The New Zealand Herald

Abstract

Someone Else's Problem applies comparative framing analysis to explore climate change-related journalism in three newspapers, The Irish Times, The New Zealand Herald and The Guardian during the 2010 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conference in Cancun, Mexico. Diverse and disjointed strains of public opinion regarding climate change are central to the inadequacies of current national and global climate change policy; public support for policy action is a necessary condition for addressing the complex problem of climate change in a meaningful and substantive democratic manner. Mass media have a democratic responsibility to help facilitate appropriate and reasoned public political discussions about climate change. Broadsheet newspapers can play important roles as traditional conduits of public sphere debate and democratically significant journalism. In all three newspapers, this thesis argues, the human or lived effects of climate change are framed as affecting people in the global south, while the power to act regarding climate change is framed as residing with elite global political agents, mostly from the global north. The global political arena in which the politics of climate change plays out is framed as chaotic and conflict-ridden, and the key agents in it are framed as self-serving players of geopolitical strategy games. Global political action is divorced from everyday lived experiences and individual action. The local politics of climate change are silent. Climate change is framed as someone else's problem. This thesis argues that economic considerations dominate the framing of climate change. Climate change policy is framed as economically favourable in The Irish Times, which endorses domestic policy action in lieu of a binding global agreement. However, in The Guardian and most evidently in The New Zealand Herald, climate change action is usually framed as costly, and the problem of climate change subsequently becomes subservient to other economic concerns. The New Zealand Herald frames domestic climate change policy as both evidence that New Zealand is taking appropriate steps to combat climate change and as a dangerous burden on the domestic economy; in doing so it paints a contradictory picture of the diplomatic importance of New Zealand as a principled and independent nation state that is also relatively powerless in the international system and economically at the mercy of other global agents.