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It's Real, but Not Here, Not Now: The Portrayal of Climate Change in U.S. Newspapers

Fri, May 22, 16:30 to 17:45, Caribe Hilton, San Cristobal Ballroom F

Abstract

The concern around many Americans' perception that climate change is a distant issue has been soaring in recent years. Although research on media coverage of climate change has been well-documented and varied in a wide range of topics, few studies have tried to look at media coverage of climate change from the perspective of psychological distance. This study employed content analysis as the primary technique to examine the portrayal of climate change in relation to psychological distance dimensions in two national and thirty-six local newspapers over a 13-month period. The results indicate that climate change is most likely to be presented as to pose impacts in a very distant or unspecified future, at the globe-level or unspecified locations, and with high certainty. Temporal dimension of climate change was positively related to both spatial and social dimensions. Moreover, national newspapers portrayed climate change as spatially more distant than local newspapers. In addition, conservative newspapers presented climate change as spatially more distant than liberal newspapers.

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