ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Science & Technology Studies (STS) perspectives on media accounts of climate change. An STS approach is contrasted to a deficit model of public understanding which suggests that more media coverage in starker language and imagery is necessary to improve public understanding, perceptions, and motivation for behavioral change. An STS approach understands the complexities, heterogeneity, and wicked problem nature of climate change and focuses on how that diversity is represented, or not, in media accounts. The chapter reports in more detail on one STS research project that poses questions about diversity in climate change framing and the presence of hybrid frames in newspaper accounts from 2000–2015 across five nations. Findings from this study indicate that political framing was more dominant than other types of news frames over this period with a potential impact of reducing the significance of climate change in the lifeworld. Hybrid framing (seamless combinations of frames) was common, but results indicate relatively fewer instances where a science frame was effectively combined with other frames (except for environmental impacts) that might connect scientific knowledge with the heterogeneous, wicked problem nature of climate change.
