A Comparative Analysis of German and Australian Climate Change Coverage in Quality Newspapers: Framing a political election and an environmental disaster

Abstract

In 2010, Germany and Australia had to deal with extreme floods. Was climate change considered as cause of these weather events in the media? In 2009, a conservative alliance committed to tackle climate change won the German election. In 2007, the Australian Labor Party claimed that “climate change is the greatest moral challenge of our time” and won the election. But how was climate change covered by the media in the context of these two elections? Based on framing theory and the Extended Sphere Model, this work answers these two questions comparing the climate change coverage of two German and two Australian quality newspapers (n = 1.012 articles).