News Media Coverage of Climate Change in India 1997-2016: Using Automated Content Analysis to Assess Themes and Topics

News media play an important role for public awareness and perception of climate change - and thus citizens' behavior. Few studies focus on media coverage in poor and developing countries such as India - the third-largest polluter and an important player in global climate change policies. Furth...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEnvironmental communication Vol. 14; no. 2; pp. 219 - 235
Main Authors Keller, Tobias R., Hase, Valerie, Thaker, Jagadish, Mahl, Daniela, Schäfer, Mike S.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Philadelphia Routledge 17.02.2020
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
Climate change
Climate models
Climate policy
Climate science
Content analysis
Developing countries
Environmental impact
Environmental policy
India
LDCs
longitudinal analysis
Media coverage
News media
Policies
Public awareness
topic modeling
India
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Summary:News media play an important role for public awareness and perception of climate change - and thus citizens' behavior. Few studies focus on media coverage in poor and developing countries such as India - the third-largest polluter and an important player in global climate change policies. Further, even these few studies on Indian media coverage span short time periods, focus on specific events, and evaluate pre-defined themes. Applying LDA topic modeling on 18,224 climate change articles published between 1997 and 2016 in two Indian newspapers, we find that climate change coverage in India has increased substantially in the last 20 years. We categorized the coverage into 28 different topics related to four overarching themes: "Climate Change Impacts", "Climate Science", "Climate Politics", and "Climate Change and Society". Climate change has gained more media attention since 2007 in general with a particular increase in focus on the theme "Climate Change Impacts". Implications about shifting media discourses and its potential to educate people and change policies are discussed.
ISSN:1752-4032
1752-4040
DOI:10.1080/17524032.2019.1643383