Jean-Baptiste Comby

CLIMATE CHANGE CONTROVERSIES IN FRENCH MASS MEDIA 1990–2010

This article offers an analysis of controversies surrounding the coverage of climate change in the French press. The theoretical framework for the analysis combines the sociology of public problems, media sociology, and science and technology studies. We present these controversies as an expression of a struggle over the ownership and framing of climate change as a public problem. Specific social groups are involved in this process of definition, framing, and agenda-setting. The success or failure of these groups in closing debates results in the construction of issues as either consensual matters-of-fact or controversial matters-of-concern. This framework allows us to distinguish between two phases in the career of this public problem, characterised by differences in ownership-configurations and the visibility of controversial points of view. We identify four relevant groups—scientists, politicians, journalists and non-governmental organisations—as well as certain social processes that help to explain changes in the attention that controversies received from the media. We conclude with the hypothesis of a third phase characterised by a relatively high degree of attention on controversies in French media.

Who Captures the Voice of the Climate? Policy Networks and the Political Role of Media in Australia, France and Japan

Climate change is by some scholars labelled a “wicked problem”, with no single problem definition and hence no ultimate solution. Such wickedness makes climate change policy-making dependent on complex networks of actors with specific interests and resources, so-called ‘policy networks’. From the perspective of policy networks, in this chapter we compare voice representation in the IPCC AR5 coverage across three countries, Australia, France and Japan. Understanding who is selected by media to speak about climate change assists in building knowledge of how media operate in climate policy networks. Our aim was to understand how news coverage is constructed in local political cultures, but also to address questions about the media’s role in the complex nexus of science–policy–media networks in different countries. To conclude, based on the findings and our analysis, we suggest that a new role of broker-journalism would aid navigation of the heavily politicised and ideologically driven discourse about climate change.