The prism of the public sphere: The COP15 coverage by the Brazilian media system

Current studies of political communication offer valuable contributions to assessing and measuring mediated deliberation. But in our understanding of the news media's role in a deliberative system a number of questions remain unanswered, especially concerning problems posed by social complexity. This paper aims to contribute to closing this gap by conducting an empirical analysis on how distinct contributions to public deliberation – namely the provision of publicity and intelligibility – are articulated via outputs offered by different types of media outlets, specifically in the case of the Brazilian coverage of the 15th UN’s Climate Change Conference (COP15). Our results suggest that this coverage seems to have fostered citizens to search for more information about this Conference and augmented the visibility of UN’s climate negotiations. This gives support to the idea that news media system works like a prism of the public sphere, promoting accountability of complex governance processes by offering information and public scrutiny adequate for a heterogeneous citizenry

Correction to: Opaque: an empirical evaluation of lobbying transparency in the UK

After the article was submitted for review, we continued improving the data. We performed a second attempt to merge groups in the lobby register with groups mentioned in ministerial meetings reports.</jats:p

Opaque: an empirical evaluation of lobbying transparency in the UK

AbstractThe government of the UK is reputed to be among the world’s most transparent governments. Yet in comparison with many other countries, its 5-year-old register of lobbyists provides little information about the lobbying activity directed at the British state. Further, its published lists of meetings with government ministers are vague, delayed, and scattered across numerous online locations. Our analysis of more than 72,000 reported ministerial meetings and nearly 1000 lobbying clients and consultants reveals major discrepancies between these two sources of information about lobbying in the UK. Over the same four quarters, we find that only about 29% of clients listed in the lobby register appear in the published record of ministerial meetings with outside groups, and less than 4% of groups disclosed in ministerial meetings records appear in the lobby register. This wide variation between the two sets of data, along with other evidence, contribute to our conclusion that the Government could have made, and still should make, the lobby register more robust.</jats:p

Counterbalancing global media frames with nationally colored narratives: A comparative study of news narratives and news framing in the climate change coverage of five countries

This study disentangles national and transnational influences on international journalism by distinguishing convergent issue framing from nationally specific narrative in news texts. In a comparative quantitative content analysis of the newspaper coverage in five democratic countries (Brazil, Germany, India, South Africa, and United States) during four United Nations climate change conferences from 2010 to 2013, both textual-visual framing and narrative features were studied simultaneously for the first time. The narrative dimension consisted of variables that gauge (1) the degree of narrativity in an article, (2) the type of narrative (i.e. stories of catastrophe, conflict, success etc.), and (3) narrative roles of victims, villains, and heroes. Hierarchical cluster analysis was used to identify both the prevailing issue frame in an article and its dominant narrative. Results show that issue frames converge more strongly across countries while narratives are more closely related to the cultural context and political particularities of each country. Investigating issue frames and narratives concurrently helps to reveal country-specific patterns of narrative coloring even for the same issue frame

Global Multimodal News Frames on Climate Change: A Comparison of Five Democracies around the World

This paper presents the first fully integrated analysis of multimodal news frames. A standardized content analysis of text and images in newspaper articles from Brazil, Germany, India, South Africa, and the United States covering the United Nations (UN) Climate Change Conferences 2010–2013 was conducted using a subset of photo-illustrated articles (n = 432) as well as the entire conference coverage (n = 1,311). In the photo-illustrated articles, four overarching multimodal frames were identified: global warming victims, civil society demands, political negotiations, and sustainable energy frames. The distribution of these global frames across the five countries is relatively similar, and a comparison of frames emerging from the national subsets also reveals a strong element of cross-national frame convergence. This is explained by the news production context at global staged political events, which features uniform media access rules and similar information supplies, as well as strong interaction between journalists from different countries and between journalists and other actors. Event-related frame convergence across vastly different contexts is interpreted as one mechanism by which truly transnational media debate can be facilitated that can potentially serve to legitimize global political decisions. In conclusion, perspectives for future qualitative and quantitative multimodal framing research are discussed

Just “performance nonsense”?: How recipients process news photos of activists’ symbolic actions about climate change politics

Abstract In this article, I investigate how recipients make sense of images that show symbolic actions by environmental activists during two recent United Nations Climate Change Conferences. Environmental advocacy groups are successful in creating visibility for their symbolic actions via news visuals, but little empirical evidence exists about how ordinary media recipients engage with this type of imagery. Can they understand the intended meaning of complex visual rhetoric used by environmental activists? I use think-aloud protocols to uncover the cognitive strategies which are used in processing these stylised visual claims. Results show that news photos rarely manage to communicate the intended meaning of symbolic actions. By systematically analysing various stages of visual frame processing, this study offers insights into specific configurations of the image-viewer relationship that cause high levels of ambiguity and prevent staged visual claims from being understood as intended. Yet I also find empirical evidence for a visual framing approach that works well and describe this recipe for effective communication via symbolic action photography.</jats:p