Climate Change Image Frames in U.S. Print News Stories

• In Event: Climate Change in the News: Regional, National, and International Perspectives

Abstract

Understanding frames in climate change news coverage has advanced substantially over the past decade, but the framing of visual imagery that often accompanies news texts remains relatively unexplored. We report on a set of image frames identified through content analysis of 350 images associated with 200 news articles from 11 US newspaper and magazine sources through late 2009. We reliably identified and quantified the occurrence of 118 image themes. We then hierarchically clustered the themes based on their co-occurrence in images to identify 42 image frames. We highlight certain frames associated with particular types of images (e.g., photographs, maps) or geographic regions. From among the full set of frames, we identify 14 that commonly appear in US climate change news imagery and discuss the ways in which image frames make salient (or render invisible) particular categories of people, geographic regions, aspects of science, and spheres of activity.

Authors

• Stacy Rebich-Hespanha, U of California - Santa Barbara

• Ronald E. Rice, U of California - Santa Barbara

• Daniel Montello, U of California - Santa Barbara

• Sean Retzloff, U of California - Santa Barbara

• Sandrine Tien, U of California - Santa Barbara

• Joao Hespanha, U of California - Santa Barbara