Global, Not Yet Local: Media Coverage of Climate Change and Environment Related Challenges in Latvia
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Date
2022-01-30
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Abstract
Media are essential actors in transmitting, contesting and embedding the attitudes towards climate change, yet media performance in post-communist countries has been relatively little researched. Informed by conceptual frameworks of strategic narratives, agenda-setting and framing, this paper investigates the media coverage of climate change and environment related issues in Latvia. The paper demonstrates the representation of climate change and environment related issues in Latvian and Russian-speaking traditional and online media, using quantitative data analysis of 3753 media articles, video and audio broadcasts from August 2020 till January 2021, as well as qualitative content analysis of seven peaks. The findings reveal a significant amount of climate change and environment related articles and broadcasts in Latvian media. News agencies and public broadcasters are the most important media segments in terms of publishing, whereas online media are prior in terms of the audiences reached. International efforts emerge as a dominant theme in the media coverage, while climate change per se receives a minor journalist attention. Both observations confirm a low level of climate change domestication in the Latvian media. Media reliance on political and government information sources and prepackaged material suggests a high potential for official political narratives to spread, yet the persuasive power of strategic narratives remains blurred as the perception side is highly underreported.
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Funding Information: The author is grateful for the valuable comments of both anonymous reviewers, which helped to improve the manuscript considerably. This study has been supported by a research grant of Rīga Stradiņš University, Latvia, assigned to a project “Climate change narrative in Latvia: in search of a “golden opportunity” for civil society, the economy and foreign policy” (August 1, 2020 – July 31, 2021). Publisher Copyright: © 2022
Keywords
Climate change, Strategic narratives, Media projection, Domestication, Information sources, Latvia, 1.5 Earth and related Environmental sciences, 5.8 Media and Communication, 1.1. Scientific article indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus database, SDG 13 - Climate Action
Citation
Kleinberga, V 2022, 'Global, Not Yet Local: Media Coverage of Climate Change and Environment Related Challenges in Latvia', Information & Media, vol. 93, pp. 8-27. https://doi.org/10.15388/Im.2022.93.58