Climate change sceptics in the German online news To what extent is scepticism about climate change present in German online news websites?

Climate scientists agree on the existence, human cause and negative impact of climate change. Nonetheless, there are still people who are sceptical about it and this is reflected in the media, also in Germany, the 6th most CO2-emiting country in the world. Currently climate change mitigation policies are urgently needed to avoid a global warming of more than 1.5°C and media outlets play an important role in this process. They can not only increase public attention but also provoke or undermine public action. In a time when the internet becomes increasingly important for news consumption in Germany, there is very little research on online news regarding climate change scepticism. Furthermore, a study that combines climate change scepticism with an analysis of (political) actors and framing theory is still missing. This Master Thesis analyses to what extent scepticism about climate change is present in the German online news using a quantitative content analysis. The sample of this thesis consists of 241 online news articles from Der Spiegel, tagesschau.de, Bild.de and Focus Online in the period of January to December 2019. The focus of the analysis is to investigate the general level of fundamental, attribution and impact scepticism, the most important actors in the articles and the frames that are being used to report about climate change. This study shows that overall scepticism about climate change is not present in the German online news. Because previous studies emphasize that conservative news outlets are usually the most sceptical about climate change, this finding leads to the conclusion that especially conservative online news outlets have become less sceptical in the past years. Nevertheless, sceptical actors are frequently mentioned, and politically left-wing oriented news websites are more likely to mention and criticise them. Furthermore, the framing of the climate change debate does not depend on the political orientation but instead on the topical focus and/ or type of news outlet. For instance, the tabloid news website Bild.de highlights conflict frames and is least likely to mention consequences of climate change while the political quality news website Der Spiegel is most likely to use responsibility frames and highlights consequences of climate change in nature. This thesis emphasizes the responsibilities that news outlets have in times of crisis, by, for example, highlighting the scientific consensus on climate change instead of focussing on conflicts between famous actors to increase revenue. Future research could either qualitatively analyse how news websites report about sceptical actors or take social media into account, as it is also increasingly used for news consumption.