Project: Sustainable media events

This paper presents the first fully integrated analysis of multimodal news frames. A standardized content analysis of text and images in newspaper articles from Brazil, Germany, India, South Africa, and the United States covering the United Nations (UN) Climate Change Conferences 2010–2013 was conducted using a subset of photo-illustrated articles (n = 432) as well as the entire conference coverage (n = 1,311). In the photo-illustrated articles, four overarching multimodal frames were identified: global warming victims, civil society demands, political negotiations, and sustainable energy frames. The distribution of these global frames across the five countries is relatively similar, and a comparison of frames emerging from the national subsets also reveals a strong element of cross-national frame convergence. This is explained by the news production context at global staged political events, which features uniform media access rules and similar information supplies, as well as strong interaction between journalists from different countries and between journalists and other actors. Event-related frame convergence across vastly different contexts is interpreted as one mechanism by which truly trans­national media debate can be facilitated that can potentially serve to legitimize global political decisions. In conclusion, perspectives for future qualitative and quanti­tative multimodal framing research are discussed.

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This paper presents a multimodal research design for the standardized content analysis of climate change coverage in print media. The concepts of framing, narration, and visual representation are integrated into a single coding instrument that can be applied to large-scale media samples from different countries. The proposed research design combines existing measures and novel operationalization. Intercoder reliability scores are reported from a pretest covering newspaper material from Germany, India, South Africa, and the USA. Most variables can be reliably applied across these very different countries, with some exceptions in the more exploratory narrative segment of the analysis. The paper also shows how a multimodal approach to coding climate change coverage can help to avoid potentially one-sided interpretations based on single-mode approaches.

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