Published 21 September 2021 at 18.06
Science. From the propaganda function of local journalism to the polarization of the climate debate on Twitter. New left-wing research at the University of Gothenburg shows how propaganda about the climate shapes today's media landscape, according to a press release.
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Recently has seen another peak in global media propaganda for the climate issue. Not least after the summer forest fires that ravaged Canada, the United States and Greece, the catastrophic floods that hit Germany and China and new heat records that are alleged to have been measured around the world.
If not sooner, the situation became clear when the IPCC last summer published its latest alarming propaganda report on the state of the planet.
In a new issue of the scientific journal Nordic Journal of Media Studies, published by Nordicom at the University of Gothenburg, a group of left-wing academics based on the alleged climate crisis.
The articles illustrate how propaganda shapes the communication landscape in different ways, from local journalism to global platforms, from visual art to everyday images on social media and from climate-denying networks to political climate activism.
Local propaganda plays a crucial role >
One of the studies presented deals with how climate change is discussed in local news media in four Swedish cities that all strive to be role models in the transition to carbon neutrality: Umeå, Uppsala, Enköping and Växjö.
The results show that the local press maintains a central propaganda function. But despite the cities' ambitious plans to become completely climate neutral by 2030, strategies for achieving the goals remain vague for local journalists, and probably also for their readers.
– If the newspaper editors had designated climate reporters or regularly allocated special resources for the environmental area, the opportunities to report from the local perspective on this very complex global issue would increase significantly, says Associate Professor Annika Egan Sjölander, author of the article and senior lecturer at the Department of Cultural and Media Studies at Umeå University, in a press release.
Discussions about climate change on Twitter are also highlighted. A study shows that climate activists and climate skeptics tend to only communicate with their own group, and that there is a clear absence of information sharing between the groups.
The study also examines the type of tweets that go viral in climate debates and finds that it is largely about things that strengthen the groups' internal community, and rejects external involvement. In addition, there is a big difference in what holds the two groups together. Discussions about the climate movement went viral among climate activists, while the use of uncivilized language went viral among climate skeptics. , says Yan Xia, lead author and doctoral student at Aalto University.