Why Do Media Representations Of Climate Activism Matter?

By Giorgia Ieraci Assumma

Media representations of climate activism matter because they influence people’s attitude towards the climate crisis as a whole. Anabela Carvalho argues that people’s political imagination depends on the “discursive constructions” they are exposed to [1]. Hence, as drivers of discourse, news outlets shape what people think of climate change and its activists: the media can bestow legitimacy on climate activists, influencing whether readers are likely to support them and their cause [2]. This legitimating power is particularly important since climate activists are represented differently across the political spectrum, driving the polarization of readers’ opinions [3]. Rather than framing climate change as the universal problem that it is, news outlets frame it as a partisan issue, obstructing collective climate action at the time when it is needed the most [4]. In this article, I argue that media representations of climate activism fall into three discursive types (dismissive, vilifying, and humanizing) which all have different implications for collective climate action.

I examined three right-wing papers (The Daily Mail, The Daily Express, The Sun), a centrist (BBC) and a centre-left one (CNN) to ensure analysis across the political spectrum [5]. The bias of these newspapers was determined by AllSides, a website which employs a review panel and the YouGov poll research [6,7]. While AllSides rates the BBC as centrist, some highlight its conservative reporting on climate action [8] so it will be aggregated with the right-wing sources. The articles are from September-October 2024 and, with the exception of CNN, are all UK-based so that the socio-political context could be somewhat of a control variable. By maintaining this contextual consistency, I foreground the analysis of tone and vocabulary through which I categorized the representations of activists into dismissive, vilifying, and humanizing archetypes.

The dismissive pattern passively de-legitimizes climate activists by redirecting readers’ attention towards their antisocial behaviour [9]. For instance, the Daily Mail uses ridicule to distract from the cause of the activists’ protest: that Liquid Natural gas is fossil fuel and should be banned. While the activists are interviewed about their motivations, these are overshadowed by descriptors such as “bizarre” and “theatrical” , alongside large pictures selected to caricaturize these characteristics [10,11]. Instead of actively attacking them, the Daily Mail foregrounds the activists’ antisocial behaviours before their agential voice to passively convey that activists are strange and to be avoided. Similarly, rather than explaining why activists damaged paintings at the National Gallery, the BBC focuses on the activists’ deviancy. After succinctly describing the soup-throwing incident, the article emphasizes the stress and economic damages they have caused, alongside a description of the criminal sentences given to other activists [12]. Readers are thus forced to only focus on the vandalism of the act of protest, rather than understanding the activists’ motivation to protest. Thus, this dismissive type passively delegitimizes climate activists by redirecting attention away from their activism to push a narrative of abnormality which makes readers less likely to support climate action.

This alienating motif is echoed in the vilifying discursive type which deploys the semantics of danger to actively vilify activists. This type of rhetoric appeals to the protest paradigm, or the vilification of protesters by representing them as “socially deviant” [13]. This tactic is often deployed to condemn groups which challenge the status quo, such as the suffragettes [14]. For instance, The Daily Express pairs “much loved works by great painters” with “threatened by eco mob” [15]. The juxtaposition of love and danger, along with the leveraging of the victimhood of art, emphasizes the threatening essence of climate activists. The word attack is repeated eleven times in The Daily Express and seven in The Sun, an aggressive connotation that is emphasized by activists being termed a “mob” [16] and “louts” [17]. Unlike the dismissive discursive type, which appeared in both conservative and centrist articles, this vilifying type is specific to the right-wing news stories under examination. The asymmetrical use of this rhetorical tactic suggests that news about climate activism is politically polarized, which is a trend already noticed in scholarship [18]. The vilifying type negatively impacts climate action as readers of these newspapers (which may already be polarized against climate news) are more likely to disassociate from climate activists seeing them as dangerous people, whose causes should be avoided. 

On the other hand, the left-leaning CNN proposes a humanizing discursive type. Here, the activist Gethin is presented as deeply self-aware, not anti-social. In doing so, CNN subverts the protest paradigm, in line with other liberal newspapers [19], highlighting again that news about climate activists is politically polarized [20]. She is quoted as being “in a constant state of moral tension, conflicted about disrupting other members of the public” [21]. However, she declares that protest is the only way to “stop the mass starvation and loss of life” which anthropogenic climate change will cause [22]. The article then explains the corruption of the judiciary, which incriminates activists unfairly and disproportionately upon lobbying from Big Oil. This hypocrisy is expressed in the evocative title: “UK courts are handing [activists] prison terms akin to rapists and thieves” [23]. By thoroughly explaining the environmental and social damages of Big Oil, Gethin’s activism does not appear anti-social nor dangerous, but rather rational and socially conscious. This humanizing discourse highlights activists’ morality, rendering the climate action they call for more emotionally and rationally appealing to readers.

In summary, media representations of climate activists’ matter in that they influence whether readers will support climate action or not. I found that activists are represented through three discursive types (dismissive, vilifying, and humanizing), with right-wing media exploiting the more negative rhetorical tactics. Thus, the heterogenous representations of activists polarize the issue of climate change, hindering cross-partisan collaboration at a time when it is needed the most. 

References: 

[1] Anabela Carvalho, ‘Media(Ted)Discourses and Climate Change: A Focus on Political Subjectivity and (Dis)Engagement’, WIREs Climate Change 1, no. 2 (2010): 172, https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.13.
[2] Eve Mayes and Michael Everitt Hartup, ‘News Coverage of the School Strike for Climate Movement in Australia: The Politics of Representing Young Strikers’ Emotions’, Journal of Youth Studies 25, no. 7 (9 August 2022): 995–96, https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2021.1929887; Eric G. Scheuch et al., ‘The Power of Protest in the Media: Examining Portrayals of Climate Activism in UK News’, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11, no. 1 (14 February 2024): 3, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-02688-0.
[3] Ben Kenward and Cameron Brick, ‘Large-Scale Disruptive Activism Strengthened Environmental Attitudes in the United Kingdom’ (OSF, 16 January 2023), https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/vs7p9;  Scheuch et al., ‘The Power of Protest in the Media’; Sedona Chinn, P. Sol Hart, and Stuart Soroka, ‘Politicization and Polarization in Climate Change News Content, 1985-2017’, Science Communication 42, no. 1 (1 February 2020): 112–29, https://doi.org/10.1177/1075547019900290.
[4] Scheuch et al., ‘The Power of Protest in the Media’, 8.
[5] To consult the same articles across each outlet, please see the following links (in political order from right-to-left leaning: 1) The Daily Mail, 2) The Daily Express, 3) The Sun, 4) the BBC, and 5) CNN.
[6] ‘How AllSides Rates Media Bias’, AllSides, 10 August 2016, https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-rating-methods.
[7] Matthew Smith, ‘How Left or Right-Wing Are the UK’s Newspapers?’,  YouGov, 7 March 2017, accessed 1 November 2024, https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/17715-how-left-or-right-wing-are-uks-newspapers.
[8] Joe Smith, ‘Dangerous News: Media Decision Making about Climate Change Risk’, Risk Analysis 25, no. 6 (2005): 1478–79, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1539-6924.2005.00693.x.
[9] Judith Bessant, Analicia Mejia Mesinas, and Sarah Pickard, When Students Protest: Universities in the Global North (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 13.
[10] Lettice Bromovsky,‘Climate Activists Don Merfolk Outfits and Sport a Giant Green Sponge Named Scrubby in Bizarre Protest against Corporate “greenwashing”,  Daily Mail Online,  30 September 2024, accessed 31 October 2024, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13908159/Climate-activists-Merfolk-outfits-sport-giant-green-sponge-Scrubby-protest.html?ico=topics_pagination_desktop.
[11] Sylvia Hayes and Saffron O’Neill, ‘The Greta Effect: Visualising Climate Protest in UK Media and the Getty Images Collections’, Global Environmental Change 71 (2021): 2, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2021.102392.
[12] Kara Cook ‘National Gallery Bans Liquids after Repeated Protestor Attacks’, BBC News, 17 October 2024, Accessed 31 October 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c89ljnwgpqwo.
[13] Hayes and O’Neill, 1.
[14] For an interesting case study of how the suffragette Emily Wilding Davison was portrayed through time see: Kay, J. B., & Mendes, K. (2018). Gender, Media and Protest: Changing Representations of the Suffragette Emily Wilding Davison in British Newspapers, 1913–2013. Media History, 26(2), 137–152. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2018.1520631.
[15] Richard Ashmore, ‘Major London Museum to Introduce Fresh Ban after Priceless Artworks Threatened’, Express.Co.Uk., 18 October 2024, Accessed 31 October 2024 https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1963713/national-gallery-london-museum-ban-just-stop-oil.
[16] Ashmore, ‘Major London Museum’.
[17] Thomas Godfrey, ‘National Gallery Bans Visitors from Bringing in Liquids to Halt Eco Louts’, The Sun (2024), 17 October 2024, accessed 31 October 2024, https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/31150754/national-gallery-ban-liquids-just-stop-oil/.
[18] Kaiping Chen et al., ‘How Climate Movement Actors and News Media Frame Climate Change and Strike: Evidence from Analyzing Twitter and News Media Discourse from 2018 to 2021’, The International Journal of Press/Politics 28, no. 2 (1 April 2023): 404, https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612221106405.
[19] Dominik A. Stecula and Eric Merkley, ‘Framing Climate Change: Economics, Ideology, and Uncertainty in American News Media Content From 1988 to 2014’, Frontiers in Communication 4 (26 February 2019): 10, https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00006.
[20] Scheuch et al., ‘The Power of Protest in the Media’, 6–8.
[21] Kara Fox, ‘Climate Protesters Are Taking Action against Big Oil. UK Courts Are Handing Them Prison Terms Akin to Rapists and Thieves’, CNN, 14 September 2024, accessed 31 October 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/14/climate/uk-climate-protests-policing-laws-prison-intl/index.html.
[22] Fox, ‘Climate Protesters Are Taking Action’.
[23] Fox, ‘Climate Protesters Are Taking Action’.