Framing Climate Change Discourse in Turkish Media

Abstract

The public understanding and policy agendas about the climate change issue have been influenced by the media, one of the most dominant industries in the 21st century. Decades of research have been conducted in media analysis to understand how the media shapes public engagement and policy agendas about the climate change phenomenon. The news media frames create the awareness of issues linked to climate change, and therefore, have a significant influence on the public understanding and engagement for collective actions on adaptation and mitigation policies. This study investigates climate change frames in the Turkish media with applying a quantitative and qualitative content analysis in the years between 2009 and 2015. Based on newspaper content analysis, Benford and Snow’s notion of the core framing tasks is used to deeply analyze the Turkish media discourse on climate change issues (Benford & Snow, 2000; Snow & Benford, 1988). I coded 332 articles extracted from three mainstream newspapers in Turkey: Cumhuriyet, HaberTürk, and Hürriyet. I use a holistic approach to address climate change to identify predominant media core framing tasks and detect the relevant categories in order to extend the concept of these prevailing frames.