S2 – Contested climate futures: Discursive power play in the media

This project investigates how the media impacts the power dynamics of advocacy and policy with respect to climate futures. There has been a growing trend in the polarization between transformative avant-garde advocates such as climate activists and status-quo advocates like right-wing politicians. Here, we will explore how these discursive coalitions may enable or slow down climate action by shaping media content that may lead to extreme forms of discursive polarization and prevent decision-making.

To explore this, we ask:

How do different actors gain discursive power in media debates about climate policy and thereby shape climate action or inaction?

This project applies multiple research methods from different disciplines to answer these questions. We seek to advance the theoretical conceptualization of discursive power play with regards to contested climate futures. Theoretical conceptualization as well as qualitative and quantitative content analyses of the media discourse will be the pathway to utilizing advanced large language model (LLM) based methods to a large media corpus to compare media debates on climate policy issues across climate policies, time, actors, media types (e.g., social media vs. news media) and formats from four countries—Germany, South Africa, India, and the United States. We will also analyze dynamics of digital media networks intertwined with the changing professional logics of news media. We will compare the media discourse on different specific climate policy cases. During this process, AI-based research methods will be advanced to build a suitable infrastructure for content analyses. As a last goal, we will link results from a three-wave panel survey among German media users to explore possible media effects (see sub-project Down2Earth for more details).

Team Members: