Brazilian Media and Climate Change: Analysis of Media Coverage Trends, Approaches and Criteria of Newsworthiness

Abstract

The media have an important role in invigorating the public sphere and creating a forum for public discourse. This is especially critical for climate change and the public understanding of this phenomenon, including its uncertainties, controversies, risks and threats as well as future projections and coping possibilities. The media offer to the individuals symbolic forms of representing their relations with the phenomenon, and have the responsibility to represent complex issues related to climate change, seeking to connect them to the experiences of modern life. Understanding how the media have covered and diffused these issues is a big challenge for researchers who work on the triad science – communication – society. This paper seeks to contribute to this analytical field and filling the gap in terms of Brazilian studies focused on climate change and coverage, presenting and discussing results of a study conducted between 2014 and 2016, which aimed: (i) to understand the coverage media of issues related to climate change and energy throughout an analyses of news published between 2000 and 2014 in a large national Brazilian newspaper; (ii) to understand journalists’ perceptions of media coverage on climate change through content analysis of interviews with Brazilian professionals who cover these issues. Results are presented and discussed considering three arguments: (i) tendency for an event-centred coverage reporting; (ii) change in the coverage trends of climate change along the years; (iii) adoption of criteria of newsworthiness to select information and cover climate change, including sense of opportunity, interest for human and conflict.