Framing of COP28 by the United Kingdom and the United States News Media

This thesis analyzes how news media in the United States and the United Kingdom framed the COP28 climate summit. The study is driven by the important influence of media on shaping public opinion and discussion on climate change. The main focus of the research is to examine how online news media in the UK and US presented the COP28 summit by detecting main frames and analyzing them across various news articles. The news articles are the following; BBC News, CNN, The Daily Mail, Fox News, New York Times, Sky News, The Guardian, and USA Today, The Washington Post and The Telegraph. A frame analysis methodology based on established frameworks from Entman (1993), McQuail (1994), Scheufele (1999), and Semetko and Valkenburg (2000) was utilized in conducting a qualitative content analysis (QCA) and more precisely a qualitative frame analysis. The research consisted of gathering and examining fifty news articles from ten prominent online news sources mentioned prior, evenly distributed between the UK and the US, published before, during, and within a month after the COP28 summit. The data analysis was conducted with the assistance of the QDA tool Atlas.ti, which simplified the process of coding and grouping frames. The study found multiple dominant frames, with "regulation" and "responsibility" standing out as the most found frames. The frame of "regulation," found 505 times, emphasized the execution and success of climate policies, showcasing the summit's emphasis on policy alterations. The "responsibility" frame, found 463 times, highlighted the importance of finding accountability. Additional inductive findings were "environmental consequences," "players”, “criticism”, “other subject” and “political agenda”, all focusing on various facets of climate change and the summit's influence. 2 The research also pointed out the utilization of denial, dramatization and political agendas, especially in media sources with specific opinion biases. For instance, Fox News and The Daily Mail often utilized perspectives that criticized certain administrations and encouraged doubt towards climate proposals, in line with previous research on media prejudice and division. The results highlight the intricacy of how media presents environmental issues in journalism and how it affects public discussions. Using frames in various media outlets to discuss COP28 indicates a nuanced depiction, but conservative and liberal outlets showed distinct framing strategies. The research adds to our knowledge of how media impacts the portrayal of climate change and emphasizes the necessity for more studies, such as examining non-western media and investigating social media platforms’ climate change coverage. Overall, this study offers important perspectives on how leading media sources in the UK and US present climate summits, impacting policy decisions and societal involvement.