The Coverage of Climate Change in Norway:
A step towards the scientific consensus
Ole Henrik Forseth Karlsen (12817643) Master’s Thesis
Political Communication Supervisor: Dr. Damian Trilling Graduate School of Communication
Universiteit van Amsterdam June 26, 2020
Norway is known for having one of the highest shares of climate skeptics (contrarians) in the world. The aim of the current study was to investigate the inclusion of contrarians and the use of them to balance arguments on anthropogenic climate change (traditional balance), both over time and across newspapers. The study expected a decline in the inclusion of contrarians and the use of traditional balance. Complementary, the study expected an increase in alternative ways of balancing opinions (alternative balance), such as who should bear the responsibilities of tackling climate change. The left-leaning newspaper was further expected to include more contrarians while the right-leaning newspaper was expected to include unchallenged, dominant contrarians. A content analysis was conducted on three national print newspapers covering a timeframe from 2013 to 2019 (N = 336). The results show that contrarians are still included in the newspapers’ coverage, although to a limited degree. Furthermore, many were framed in a negative way, hinting that the coverage has shifted towards interpretive journalism, as suggested by Brüggemann and Engesser (2017). Over time, there was only a significant decline in articles where contrarians were the dominant voice. No changes were found for the use of traditional balance nor for alternative balance. When comparing the newspapers, the more politically neutral Verdens Gang (VG) was found to include a much higher share of both types of contrarians. Regarding balance, the right-leaning newspaper Aftenposten was found to less often use traditional balance when no side was negatively framed. Last, more research is needed to better determine the scope of alternative balance, as the current study did not manage to identify the full use of it.
Keywords: anthropogenic climate change, print newspaper coverage, contrarians, traditional
Literature Review ... 3 Traditional Balance ... 3 Alternative Balance ... 5 Theoretical Framework ... 6 Method ... 8 Case Selection ... 8 Country. ... 8 Newspapers. ... 8 Timeframe ... 9 Research Design ... 10 Article Search ... 11 Key Variables ... 12 Anthropogenic view. ... 12 Total contrarians. ... 13 Dominant contrarians. ... 13 Traditional balance. ... 13
Traditional balance corrected. ... 14
Alternative balance. ... 14 Intercoder Reliability ... 15 Results ... 15 General Characteristics ... 15 Inclusion of Contrarians ... 16 Use of Balance ... 19 Discussion ... 22 Conclusion ... 24 References ... 27
Appendix A – Remarks on Codebook ... 33
Appendix B – Codebook ... 35
Appendix C – Intercoder Reliability Test ... 45
First, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Trilling, for the guidance when needed and for the confidence in my work. I am also very grateful for Leif Karlsen and his contribution to the intercoder reliability test. In addition, I would like to thank Dr. Painter for providing me with his codebook, which helped me increase the validity for specific items in my own codebook. Last, credit is given to Kilian Munch (photographer) and Norsk olje og gass for the photo of the Norwegian prime minister in a speech on climate change; and Markus Spiske (photographer) and Unsplash for the photo of the climate demonstration on the front cover (front page, both used with permission).
The coverage of climate change in Norway: A step towards the scientific consensus December 1969 marks one of the biggest turning points in Norwegian history as oil was found on the continental shelf (Norwegian Petroleum, n.d.). Since then, the country has prospered on this liquid gold at the same time as striving to uphold an image of being green (Sengupta, 2017). With this paradox, as well as high emissions compared to their size (Global Carbon Atlas, n.d.) and a strong presence of climate skeptics (Smith, 2019), Norway is likely to have ongoing debates on climate change (Brüggemann & Engesser, 2017). Tracking the course of the last seven years, this article aims at investigating how the climate change coverage in Norwegian newspapers has changed. More specifically, the focus is on the inclusion of skeptics and the use of balance in the climate change debate. The research question is as follows:
How has the inclusion of contrarians and the use of balance in Norwegian national newspapers’ climate change coverage changed from 2013 to 2019?
To elaborate, balance refers to one of the key strategies journalists use to increase the objectivity of their articles and is defined as balancing one actor’s opinion with another’s (Mellado et al., 2018). The traditional way of applying balance regarding climate change is between the anthropogenic view and the contrarian view (see for instance, Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004; Boykoff & Mansfield, 2008). The former stresses humans’ greenhouse gas emissions as one of the main drivers to climate change; while contrarians refer to those who question the human contribution or even denies that global temperatures have risen (Painter, 2011). The inclusion of actors such as contrarians is here narrowed down to actors who are directly or indirectly quoted with their opinions on climate change in a newspaper article. A broader scope with mentioned actors could have provided more nuance, but it would have made it harder to assess whether the balancing of
opinions occurs. For instance, if a politician says we should lower our emissions and mentions that they will not collaborate with a climate skeptic party, their opinion is still not challenged and the article is not balanced.
The societal relevance of the question is the increased understanding it can provide to how climate change is covered as well as how it is discussed in prominent climate skeptic countries. Previous research has linked the media’s use of balance to the public’s misperception of the scientific consensus (Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004; Brüggemann & Engesser, 2017). The consensus refers to the 97% of climate scientists who agree that anthropogenic climate change is taking place (Cook et al., 2016). In addition, there is also the assessment reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which are endorsed by consensus of the 195 member countries before publication (IPCC, n.d.). Still, in several countries there is a high share of people who are not convinced that humans are one of the main contributors to climate change (Smith, 2019). Rahmstorf (2012) blames the use of balance for this discrepancy and goes as far as comparing the inclusion of contrarians with a satellite launch, where “someone from the Flat Earth Society was quoted for balance” (p. 2).
The academic relevance adds to this by exploring how the strategy of balance may be changing regarding the coverage of climate change. Brüggemann and Engesser (2017) argued that the decline in balanced reporting has led to the more subjective, interpretive journalism, where contrarians are contextualized and framed in a negative way to weaken their argument. However, they did not investigate whether other forms of balancing occur in a way of retaining objectivity. For instance, instead of a decline there could be that other types of balancing have emerged, such as differing opinions on what type of actions are needed. Boykoff and Boykoff (2004) examined this early on when traditional balance was still prominent and found a distinction between
immediate and mandatory actions versus cautious and voluntary actions. Further investigation on alternative ways of balancing can provide valuable insights to the scientific discussion, in addition to tracking the changes in the more traditional way.
In the upcoming two sections, a review of the literature is presented leading up to the theoretical framework with the hypotheses for the current study. The third section presents the methodology, followed by a presentation and discussion of the results. Last are the concluding remarks with suggestions for further research.
Literature Review
The newspapers’ coverage of climate change has been analyzed in several studies. Boykoff and Boykoff (2004) were one of the pioneers in the field, tracking the changing use of balance between 1988 and 2002. McKnight (2010) and Boykoff and Mansfield (2008) continued the timeline, covering the years from 1997 to 2007 and 2000 to 2006 respectively. Some of the later advancements have been done by Painter and Ashe (2012) and Brüggemann and Engesser (2017), with the former covering the period from 2007 to 2010 and the latter from 2011 to 2012. The first part of the literature review examines how these studies have included contrarians and used the traditional way of balancing opinions. The second part focuses on suggestions by scholars on alternative ways of balancing opinions.
Traditional Balance
Starting with traditional balance, the study of Boykoff and Boykoff (2004) investigated the how often the prestige press in the US balanced the anthropogenic view with the contrarian view. In their sample, as many as 52.7% of the articles used traditional balance and 6.2% had contrarians as the dominant voice (Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004, p. 129) – which they argued was far from the
scientific consensus. A decade later, Brüggemann and Engesser (2017) identified a change towards more support for the anthropogenic view and a decline in the use of traditional balance. The share of contrarians they found was only 18.5%, with balance almost never used. This change, they argued, could be considered a step towards interpretive journalism because the contrarians who were included often were framed in a negative way to undermine their arguments.
Although, in the gap between these two studies there has not been a steady decline in the inclusion of contrarian voices. Boykoff and Mansfield’s (2008) found a much lower rate in the use of balance compared to Boykoff and Boykoff (2004), with their results ranging between 9% - 22%. However, they found no consistent decrease in contrarians or balanced reporting following their timespan.
Next, Painter and Ashe (2012) investigated the effect of the Climategate scandal, which seemed to cause a major increase in contrarian voices for both the US and the UK. The four other countries in their sample either experienced a decrease or had stagnant shares despite the scandal. The event was later found to be taken out of proportions as the leaked emails were framed incorrectly to discredit the work of the IPCC, and investigations only found some shortcomings in the overall transparency (Carrington, 2011)
Another big event was discussed by McKnight (2010) on News Corporation’s announcement in 2007 that they now officially supported the anthropogenic view. What the study highlights is that the inclusion of contrarians is not only a matter of journalists and their striving for objectivity. It also depends on the editor, as he found that the global news agency systematically denied anthropogenic climate change throughout the decade leading up to their alleged change of mind. At least before that point – as McKnight’s (2010) study did not track the coverage following the announcement – the anthropogenic view was framed as a matter of political correctness and
belief while the contrarian view was framed as valiant. Such a systemic barrier was also addressed by Rahmstorf (2012), where a journalist’s explanation for including contrarians was that her articles would not get published otherwise.
The influence of the systemic level can also be seen in the comparisons between different newspapers. Brüggemann and Engesser (2017) found that right-leaning newspapers included more articles where contrarians were dominant and uncontested while left-leaning newspapers quoted contrarians more often but contextualized them in a negative way. Painter and Ashe (2012) found no marked difference between the types of newspaper regarding the share of contrarians. However, they did find that left-leaning newspapers more often included contrarians on the news pages while right-leaning newspapers more often included them in the opinion and editorial pages. Then again, as Brüggemann and Engesser (2017) argue, a higher prevalence in the editorial articles confirms that there is systematic bias.
Alternative Balance
Several studies have discussed the importance of going beyond the traditional distinction between the contrarian view and the anthropogenic view. However, apart from Boykoff and Boykoff’s (2004) study, no additional research seems to have analyzed the prevalence of alternative ways of balancing opinions. Some suggestions have been voiced, such as between voluntary and mandatory actions (Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004; Corry & Jørgensen, 2015); whether the actions should be implemented immediately or cautiously (Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004; Corry & Jørgensen, 2015); which actors should take the responsibility of addressing climate change (Bäckstrand & Lövbrand, 2007; Brüggemann & Engesser, 2017; Corry & Jørgensen, 2015); and whether the main solution should be based on emission reductions or technological optimism (Mitchell, 2012).
The first two distinctions were investigated by Boykoff and Boykoff (2004), which found that 78.2% of their sample articles balanced immediate or mandatory actions with cautious or voluntary actions. However, it is not clear whether these articles also included traditional balancing, or whether the contrarian view was categorized as cautious and voluntary.
Apart from their study, Brüggemann and Engesser (2017) briefly discussed responsibility regarding the case of India. What they noticed was that the newspapers in that country were not focused on the traditional distinction at all, but instead on the responsibility of historical greenhouse gas emitters versus emerging economies. This distinction was also highlighted by Agarwal and Narain (1991), who argued that it was unfair to impose emerging economies equal responsibility as their historic emissions were much lower. Bäckstrand and Lövbrand (2007) further discussed this act of imposing responsibilit, and distinguished between key actors such as intergovernmental organizations, companies, and individuals.
Last, Mitchell (2012) discussed the distinction between emission reductions and technological optimism. The former stresses that we must reduce carbon emission now and that we cannot wait for innovations to solve the problem. Such a view is also the one voiced by the IPCC (2014). The latter, on the other hand, refers to the optimism that future developments in science and technology will be the main solution and that current reductions are not that urgent.
Theoretical Framework
The theoretical framework builds on several of the mentioned studies. First, since Boykoff and Boykoff (2004) came with their results there has been a marked decline in the inclusion of contrarians in newspaper articles. The current study investigates whether the trends have continued
by tracking the coverage over the seven previous years. More specifically, the study explores whether there is a decline in the inclusion of contrarians and in the use of traditional balance.
H1: There is a decline in the share of contrarians included in the Norwegian national print newspapers from 2013 to 2019.
H2: There is a decline in the use of traditional balance in the Norwegian national print newspapers from 2013 to 2019.
Next, Brüggemann and Engesser (2017) concluded that the decrease in the use of traditional balance has led to the more subjective approach of interpretive journalism, where contrarians are not quoted for balance but to subvert their arguments. The current study aims at investigating whether a different conclusion can be made: that there is an increasing use of alternative ways of balancing opinions – such as suggested by Boykoff and Boykoff (2004), Bäckstrand and Lövbrand (2007), and Corry and Jørgensen (2015) – to counter a loss in objectivity.
H3: Following a decline in the share of contrarians and the use of traditional balance is an increase in the use of alternative ways of balancing opinions.
Last, as McKnight (2010) and Brüggemann and Engesser (2017) found, the share of contrarians and the use of balance can be influenced by the political leaning of a newspaper. Based on their findings, the current study expects a higher share of contrarian voices in the left-leaning newspaper and that these voices more often are negatively framed, while the right-leaning newspaper more often include uncontested contrarians.
H4: The left-leaning newspaper has a higher share of contrarians but frames them in a negative way, while the right-leaning newspaper more often include uncontested, dominant contrarians.
Method
Case Selection Country
Norway has been suggested by Painter and Ashe (2012) as an interesting case to study due to the high share of skepticism among its people. As mentioned in the introduction, the country stands in a dissonant position. On one hand, the country is pioneering with its policy that all new cars should be zero-emission by 2025 (Government.no, 2019; Nikel, 2019). Moreover, Norway’s storages of hydropower have been suggested as a key contributor to help lower emissions in Europe (Gurzu, 2016). One of the latest achievements was credited to Oslo, which was awarded the European green capital award in 2019 (European Commission, 2019). On the other hand, Norway is one of the world’s biggest exporters of oil and gas (Central Intelligent Agency, n.d.-a, n.d.-b). Additionally, the country had a right-wing party in government from 2013 to 2019 which until recently had taken a more skeptical stand towards anthropogenic climate change (see for instance, Sandvik, Sollund, & Randen, 2013; NTB, 2016). Overall, this gray and green ambivalence combined with high emissions (Global Carbon Atlas, n.d.) makes Norway a likely case for extensive debates on climate change (Brüggemann & Engesser, 2017).
Newspapers
Three newspapers were selected to increase the representativeness of the results at the same time as controlling for the political leaning of each newspaper. The selection criteria were that they had to be daily national print newspapers with high reach and different political leanings. The reason for selecting national newspapers was to not limit the representativeness to certain regions. A high reach would further mean that a higher share of the population gets exposed to the same articles. The newspapers would therefore be more likely to influence the public opinion compared
to newspapers with a less broad scope. Additionally, if more people read a newspaper it tells something about how well the coverage fits the average citizen. The choice of limiting the study to print newspapers was based on the availability of the articles. Whereas the print newspapers did not seem to have any missing publications, huge gaps were found for the online articles the further back in time one went. The reason for daily newspapers was to get an equal representation of each day in the week, as there could be differences in coverage on weekdays and in weekends. Regarding the last criterion, including newspapers with different political leanings was considered important to decrease the chance of a biased sample. The selection therefore opted for a left-leaning, a neutral, and a right-leaning newspaper. No distinctions were made on format as all newspapers were found to follow a tabloid rather than a quality layout.
Table 1 lists the seven national newspaper based on daily readers and political leanings. Aftenposten, Verdens Gang (VG), and Dagbladet were found to be the best cases for this study due to their high reach as well as being either left-leaning, right-leaning, or neutral.
Timeframe
The study investigates the newspaper coverage of the last seven years, counting every odd year from 2013 to 2019. Two-year intervals allowed for a broader timeframe and made it easier to track changes over time. As Norway has elections every odd year – with national elections in 2013 and 2017 and regional elections in 2015 and 2019 – this could potentially influence the climate change coverage of the selected years. For instance, some politicians may try to put the topic on the newspapers’ agenda while other politicians or big happenings may push it off the agenda. Judging by the total coverage illustrated in Figure 1, climate change kept its relevance during the years of election. The spikes in coverage could be influenced by the elections, but also of big events such as the historic Paris Agreement in 2015 (European Commission, 2015) and the massive
climate protests that took place during 2019 (Calma, 2019). Another big happening over the last decade was the fifth assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, where the first part was published in 2013 and the remaining parts in 2014 (IPCC, 2014). Overall, the odd years were found the most interesting to study considering the big happenings that have taken place as well as the potential that different actors discuss the topic in relation to the elections.
Table 1
The political leaning and the number of daily readers per national newspaper in 2017.
Newspaper Print newspaper Online newspaper Political leaning
Aftenposten 140655 816000 Right-leaning
Verdens Gang 78289 1974000 Neutral
Dagbladet 39362 1166000 Left-leaning
Klassekampen 23559 39000 Left-leaning
Vårt land 16515 22000 Christian
Dagsavisen 16582 49000 Left-leaning
Nationen 11948 30000 Center-agrarian
Sources: Bernergruppen (n.d.); Medienorge (n.d.-a, n.d.-b); Nationen (n.d.); Newman et al. (2017); Pettersen (2016, 2019); VG (2011).
Research Design
The study used a quantitative content analysis to answer the research question and the related hypotheses. Following the design of Slater et al. (2009), the design consisted of constructed months of 28 days for each selected year by each newspaper. Every constructed month included four constructed weeks, one for each three-month season of the year with a random selection of the articles per day of the week. The total sample therefore consists of 336 articles (3 newspapers x 4
Figure 1
Total coverage mentioning climate change, global warming, or greenhouse effect per newspaper.
years x 4 seasons x 7 days). In cases where a specific day of the week was not represented during a season, a random selection was conducted based on the day being on a weekday or in the weekend. All articles were then coded by the researcher, with 10.1% (n = 34) being double coded by an additional person to determine the intercoder reliability.
Overall, the selection strategy may lead to the overrepresentation of seasons with less climate change coverage and vice versa. On the other hand, it increases the chance of multiple topics being discussed instead of a few dominant ones, as well as providing results which are representative for the whole year.
Article Search
Norway’s National Library archive was used to select the articles. An article was defined as newspaper entries which express a point of view, such as news and opinion articles, fact boxes, twitter messages, and book reviews. Product advertisements, job advertisements, and the tv-guide was excluded. The full article search was conducted in two ways. The first included the three key
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 VG Dagbladet Aftenposten Total
words that previous studies have used: “global warming”, “climate change” and “greenhouse effect” (see for instance, Boykoff & Mansfield, 2008; Brüggemann & Engesser, 2017); although with the Norwegian equivalents (see Appendix A). The second search only included the word “climate” while it excluded the other search words. The reason for this was to increase the representativeness of the total sample, as there could be a tendency for contrarians to avoid using loaded words such as global warming and climate change and instead only talk about “the climate”. For the first search, all results were included apart from the advertisements and the tv-guide. For the second search, as the word climate in Norwegian is used for multiple contexts such as training and work environment, a more thorough selection was necessary to limit the number of irrelevant results. The selection was therefore based on reading the sentence before and after the highlighted search word, to determine whether the article was related to climate change. In cases of uncertainty, additional sentences were read before making a decision.
Key Variables
The study focuses on the following key variables: anthropogenic view, total contrarians, dominant contrarians, traditional balance, traditional balance corrected, and alternative balance. This subsection elaborates on the operationalization of each of them.
Anthropogenic View
The anthropogenic view builds on the following three facets: I) global warming has taken place; II) human activity and emissions are one of the main drivers for global warming; and III) we must reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to avoid further damage (Brüggemann & Engesser, 2017). Different actors, such as politicians, experts, and companies, may often take the first two as given and instead only discuss the third facet. For instance, the prime minister may talk about how
to reduce emissions and not about whether global temperatures have increased. Mentioning climate change or global warming without voicing skepticism is considered as support, in line with Brüggemann and Engesser’s (2017) study.
Total Contrarians
This variable refers to all actors with the contrarian view, meaning that they challenged the anthropogenic view with one of the following reversed facets: A) global warming is not happening and differences in temperatures are due to natural variations; B) global warming is happening, but the increase is due to natural cycles, sun activity, or unknown factors – human influence is minimal or non-existent; and C) humans contribute to global warming, but the actor is skeptical to whether there will be negative consequences, to whether we must reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, to the scientific models, or to the scientific consensus (Painter, 2011). The last facet also includes actors who specify explicitly that humans contribute to only a few of the changes we see.
Dominant Contrarians
As the Brüggemann and Engesser (2017) pointed out, some actors quote opposing views but frame them in a negative way. For instance, a politician may present arguments supporting anthropogenic climate change while quoting a contrarian in a clearly negative way to undermine their arguments. To identify the articles where the contrarians were dominant, all cases with negative framing of contrarians were excluded. Additionally, articles which included traditional balance were also excluded.
Traditional Balance
This variable refers to whether an article balances the anthropogenic view with the contrarian view. The criteria for an article to be counted as balanced were that it had to include
actors from both views and the ratio between them could not exceed 2:1. This means that an article was not counted as balanced if there were three contrarians and only one actor supporting the anthropogenic view. A less strict ratio such as 3:1 could have been used; however, this would only have increased the total number of cases by four.
Traditional Balance Corrected
As with dominant contrarians, this variable takes into account the negative framing of an actor. Although, this variable also controlling for contrarians who negatively framed someone with the anthropogenic view. The variable therefore represents the total number of articles which were truly balanced.
Alternative Balance
The last variable includes all articles where alternative balancing was used, counting voluntary or mandatory actions, immediate or cautious implementations, suggested solutions, and imposed responsibility. The first differentiates between whether an actor argues in favor of voluntary, only recommended actions or mandatory action through law, fines, or taxes. The second is between a call for immediate and faster implementations versus cautious actions without much haste. The third distinguishes between actors who stresses that greenhouse gas reductions or innovations in research and technology are the main solutions to climate change. The last type of balancing refers to whether one imposes the responsibility to address climate change to a certain type of actor. The alternatives ranged from intergovernmental organizations to each and one of us as individuals. For a more elaborate operationalization of the different types, see Appendix B. A fifth type of alternative balance was considered, namely whether one sees the climate change prospects as positive or negative. However, the item was not included as it did not achieve a satisfactory score in the intercoder reliability test (Krippendorff’s alpha = .44).
To be counted as alternative balance, an article had to include at least two different opinions within at least one of the four types. In addition, the ratio between the two opinions could not exceed 2:1, as with traditional balance. However, no additional articles would have been included with a higher ratio.
Intercoder Reliability
Overall, most of the items in the codebook achieved acceptable reliability scores, as one can see in Table C1. However, apart from the climate change prospects, two subcategories had a Krippendorff’s alpha below the threshold of .67: imposing responsibility to international actors (Krippendorff’s alpha = .66) and imposing responsibility to individuals (Krippendorff’s alpha = .66). Since the scores were just below the threshold, in addition to a high overall score for responsibility (Krippendorff’s alpha = .84), the two subcategories were not excluded.
Results
The first part of the analyses looks at the descriptive statistics of the sample. Then, the inclusion of contrarians and the use of the different types of balancing were analyzed conducting binary logistic regressions, to identify whether there were significant differences over time and between the newspapers.
General Characteristics
The different characteristics of the articles are illustrated in Table 2. One of the biggest discrepancies is regarding the author’s gender, which is predominantly male. Articles under unknown were either anonymous authors, news agencies, or leader articles. For the last one, it was not clear which person from the editorial board who wrote them, at the same time as the articles are supposed to reflect the newspaper’s and not a specific person’s view. For world scope, most
articles combined Norwegian actors and international ones, which at least partially may be explained by the global dimension of climate change.
Regarding the topics, the first seven were selected based on the planetary boundaries discussed by Steffen et al. (2015), where human’s impact on the climate is divided into distinct categories with boundaries for what the earth can handle. Climate change is consider of focal importance as it impacts every category (Steffen et al., 2015). Interestingly, their study puts nitrogen and phosphorus – together with biodiversity – as the only categories currently within the high-risk zone. The two elements were however not mentioned once, which could point to both a bias in the coverage of what climate change encompasses as well as the complexity of the issue as a whole. The remaining topics were identified inductively while testing the codebook. Several of the articles under “other” related to environmental politics but was first identified during the coding.
In addition to the table, Figure 2 shows the overview of articles which had either a dominant anthropogenic view, a dominant contrarian view, or a balance between these two. As one can see, traditional balance was not much used, especially when correcting for articles where negative framing was used.
Inclusion of Contrarians
To test whether the inclusion of contrarians differs between newspapers and over time, two binary logistic regressions were conducted: one for all articles where contrarians were included (total contrarians) and one for the articles where contrarians were dominant (dominant contrarians). The independent variables of the regressions were year and newspaper. For total contrarians, both VG and year were close to significant (p = .082; p = .070, respectively) while Aftenposten was
Table 2
General characteristics of the articles.
Variable Level % Variable Level %
Newspaper VG 33.3 Size3 A2+ 1.5
Dagbladet 33.3 (excluding A2 5.4 Aftenposten 33.3 photos) A3 32.4 Year 2013 25.0 A4 30.4 2015 25.0 A5 15.5 2017 25.0 A6 14.9 2019 25.0 Type News 41.1
Seasons Jan-Mar 25.0 Opinion 55.4
Apr-Jun 25.0 Review 1.2
Jul-Sep 25.0 Fact box 0.9
Oct-Dec 25.0 Other 1.5
Day Monday 14.01 Topic Climate change 50.9
Tuesday 14.3 Land use 2.7
Wednesday 14.3 Ocean pollution 1.2
Thursday 14.3 Freshwater 0.3
Friday 14.61 Phosphorus, nitrogen 0.0
Saturday 17.92 Chemicals 0.0
Sunday 10.72 Biodiversity 5.1
Gender, Male 49.7 Natural disasters 7.4
author Female 25.0 Renewable-related 5.1
Both 9.8 Nuclear power 0.6
Unknown 15.5 Oil 9.2
World Norway 29.2 Economy, business 0.9
scope International 11.3 Other 16.7
Both 59.5
Note. 1 In 2015, VG had no results for one Monday; a random selection of another weekday was
used instead. 2 Dagbladet stopped selling Sunday newspapers in 2014 (Husby, 2013), a random selection of Saturday was used instead. 3 A3 is understood as one newspaper page, A2 is two pages, A4 is half a page, etc.
Figure 2
The share of articles with the anthropogenic, the contrarian, or a balanced view.
well above (p = .685). This regression was therefore rerun with a dichotomous variable comparing VG with the other newspapers, taking away the potentially confounding influence of Aftenposten. The results for both types of contrarians are listed in Table 3.
Although there seems to be a decline for both in Figure 3, there was only a significantly decreased likelihood of 40% per year for the dominant contrarians (p = .013). For total contrarians, the change was non-significant (p = .070). In addition, the only marked difference regarding which facets were challenged seemed to be for dominant contrarians who challenged Facet A, as these were neither present in 2017 nor 2019 (see Figure D1 and D2). This indicates that dominant contrarians declined in both numbers as well as controversy.
For the differences between the newspapers, VG was found to have twice the likelihood of including total contrarians (p = .021) and five times as likely to include dominant contrarians (p = .005) in their articles. These differences are illustrated in Figure 4. In addition, VG negatively framed 20% of their total contrarians, Dagbladet 13.3%, and Aftenposten 54%. Regarding the
facets that were challenged, Facet A again stood out as the biggest difference, with a higher prevalence in VG and lower prevalence in Dagbladet for both types of contrarians (see Figure D3 and D4).
Table 3
Logistic regression of total contrarians (TC) and dominant contrarians (DC).
Variable OR SE 95% CI p X2 (df) p R2 H&L (df) p I. TC Constant 0.26 0.37 - < .001 8.5 (2) .014 .04 11.9 (6) .065 Year 0.78 0.14 [0.60,1.02] .070 VG 2.0 0.31 [1.1,3.7] .021 II. DC Constant 0.12 0.65 - .001 20.4 (3) < .001 .14 18.1 (8) .020 Year 0.60 0.21 [0.40,0.90] .013 VG 5.0 0.58 [1.6,15.6] .005 Aftenposten 1.0 0.72 [0.24,4.1] 1.0
Note. X2 and the related p-value shows the significance of model. R2 = Nagelkerke R2. H&L = Hosmer-Lemeshow goodness-of-fit.
Use of Balance
To test the use of balance across newspapers and over time, three binary logistic regressions were conducted: the first including all cases of traditional balancing, the second on traditional balancing corrected for negative framing, and the last one on the use of alternative balancing. Figure 5 shows the changes over time for all the three types. However, as one can see in Table 4,
the changes were not significant for any of them (p = .530 for traditional balance; p = .596 for traditional balance corrected; p = .188 for alternative balance).
Figure 3
Total and dominant contrarians as a percentage of the share of articles per year.
Figure 4
Total and dominant contrarians as a percentage of the share of articles per newspaper.
0 5 10 15 20 25 VG Dagbladet Aftenposten Total contrarians Dominant Contrarians 0 5 10 15 20 25 2013 2015 2017 2019 Total contrarians Dominant contrarians
Next was the comparison between the newspapers on the use of balance, which is illustrated in Figure 6. The results only revealed a significant difference for corrected traditional balance, with a lower likelihood of 88% for Aftenposten to include this type (p = .045). For the other newspapers, no significant differences were found neither for traditional balancing (p = .810 for VG; p = .623 for Aftenposten) nor for alternative balancing (p = .604 for VG; p = .789 for Aftenposten).
Figure 5
Types of balance as a percentage of the share of articles per year.
Figure 6
Types of balance as a percentage of the share of articles per newspaper.
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 2013 2015 2017 2019 Traditional balance
Traditional balance corrected Alternative balance 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 VG Dagbladet Aftenposten Traditional balance
Traditional balance corrected Alternative balance
Table 4
Logistic regression for traditional balance (TB), traditional balance corrected (TBC), and alternative balance (AB).
Variable OR SE 95% CI p X2 (df) p R2 H&L (df) p I. TB Constant 0.13 0.54 - < .001 0.64 (3) .888 .004 2.7 (8) .954 Year 0.89 0.18 [0.63,1.3] .530 VG 0.81 0.48 [0.35,2.3] .810 Aftenposten 0.78 0.50 [0.30,2.1] .623 II. TBC Constant 0.11 0.73 - .002 7.1 (3) .068 .08 7.5 (8) .484 Year 0.87 0.27 [0.51,1.5] .596 VG 0.36 0.69 [0.09,1.4] .137 Aftenposten 0.12 1.1 [0.01,0.95] .045 III. AB Constant .03 0.67 - < .001 2.1 (3) .563 .02 10.6 (8) .223 Year 1.3 0.19 [0.88,1.9] .188 VG 1.3 0.52 [0.47,3.7] .604 Aftenposten 1.2 0.54 [0.40,3.3] .789
Note. X2 and the related p-value shows the significance of model. R2 = Nagelkerke R2. H&L = Hosmer-Lemeshow goodness-of-fit.
Discussion
The first hypothesis expected a decline in the inclusion of contrarians over time. The results partially support this. When all types of contrarians were included, no significant changes were found. However, for the dominant contrarians – the ones who were not negatively framed or balanced – there was a marked, significant decline. This change did not manifest into a decline in the use of traditional balance nor to an increase in alternative balance, as the two following
hypotheses expected. Although, a closer examination of the changes from 2017 to 2019 seems to indicate that a divergence could be taking place.
Then again, even though alternative balance did not differ much in prevalence compared to traditional balance, this could be due to the limited reach of the item assessing the solutions to climate change. As no previous studies seem to have included a similar category, the current study opted to compare the Mitchell’s (2012) distinction between emission reductions and innovation. However, there were many articles which discussed other solutions that did not fall into the two categories. That there is a shift taking place regarding different solutions was, for instance, discussed in one of the sample articles in Aftenposten. In an opinion piece, the editor stated that previous climate journalism has focused on traditional balancing; while now, this type of journalism was instead to be focused on potential solutions (Aftenposten, 2015).
The results also show a similar trend of negative framing as highlighted by Brüggemann and Engesser (2017). As Figure 2 showed, when correcting for negative framing the anthropogenic view increased with 3.3% and the contrarian view increased with 1.2%, compared to the total share. This not only highlights the importance of controlling for negative quoting, but also to look for cases where contrarians negatively framed supporters of anthropogenic climate change. The figure also shows a striking similarity to the study of Boykoff and Boykoff (2004) with a similar share of dominant contrarians, considering the difference in time. On the other hand, there is a steep decline in the inclusion of contrarians and the use of traditional balancing: from 94.1% of the articles including contrarians and 52.7% using traditional balance (Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004) to 15.8% contrarians and a corrected balance of 3.6% in the current study. Compared to the more recent study of Brüggemann and Engesser (2017), the findings were more similar with their 18.5% contrarians and almost non-existent traditional balance.
The last hypothesis expected Dagbladet, as the left-leaning newspaper, to have a higher share of contrarians and to more often use negative framing. Aftenposten, the right-leaning newspaper, was expected to include more uncontested, dominant contrarians. The results did not support this hypothesis. On the contrary, the more politically neutral VG was found to have a much higher likelihood of including both total contrarians and dominant contrarians in their articles. Furthermore, Aftenposten was the one who most often negatively framed the contrarians while Dagbladet did this the least. This also resulted in Aftenposten using significantly less traditional but corrected balance. These findings are neither in line with the study of Brüggemann and Engesser (2017) nor Painter and Ashe (2012). However, even though Aftenposten and Dagbladet had a similar share of total and dominant contrarians, Aftenposten did included more contrarians who challenged the fact that global warming has taken place.
Conclusion
The current study investigated the inclusion of contrarians and the use of balance in Norwegian national print newspapers from 2013 to 2019. Tracking the changes over time, the findings only supported a significant decline in the inclusion of dominant contrarians. For traditional and alternative balance, even though a divergence seems to be taking place the last couple of year, the changes over time were non-significant. However, the use of traditional balance was almost not taking place in the current sample, with as few as 3.6% of the articles providing a true balanced account of the opposing viewpoints. 89% of the articles represented the anthropogenic view, but this is still a bit below the scientific consensus. Then again, with fewer and less controversial dominant contrarians, the findings could be considered a step in the right direction.
Next, the study did not find any support for the right-leaning newspaper Aftenposten to include more contrarians or traditional balancing. On the contrary, the politically neutral VG was found to have significantly more of both total and dominant contrarians. In addition, Aftenposten was found to have a much lower likelihood of using traditional balance corrected for negative framing, especially compared to the left-leaning newspaper Dagbladet. The right-leaning newspaper also used negative framing the most of all three, but Dagbladet included less controversial dominant contrarians.
A limitation of the study was the concept of alternative balance, or more specifically the subcategory of suggested solutions to climate change. As no research seems to have included this variable, the current study used a distinction between greenhouse gas reduction and innovation. However, the coding process revealed a much more nuanced discussion which the codebook did not detect. It is therefore yet uncertain whether the non-significant differences over time and between the newspapers will hold in future research.
A similar limitation was found for climate change prospects, which in the end was not included as part of the alternative balance. The intercoder reliability test revealed a low agreement on the concept, possibly due to vague statements in the newspaper articles. For instance, some actors stated they were pessimistic, but then said they were still hopeful. Others focused just on the present, and if the future was mentioned it was not clear whether the forecasted changes were perceived as negative or simply neutral. Regardless of these limitations, alternative balance was still found with a comparable prevalence to traditional balance.
One suggestion for future research is to identify the range of suggested solutions to climate change, to better understand the characteristics of newspapers’ climate change coverage and whether the use of alternative balance is increasing. In addition, if one wants to gain a better
understanding of how newspapers influence the public opinion, future studies should focus more on the online platforms due to the higher reach. As online articles do not face the same physical limitations in length as printed articles, it may also be that the inclusion of contrarians and the use of balance differs between them.
On an ending note, the presence of negative framing and the low use of alternative balance seem to support Brüggemann and Engesser’s (2017) conclusion that the climate change coverage has shifted towards interpretive journalism. Furthermore, with the decline in unchallenged contrarians, the overall coverage can be considered a step closer to the scientific consensus. Such a shift away from the contrarian view could be aptly illustrated with one of the leader articles in Dagbladet. Regarding a news notice about the pope giving industrial countries the main responsibility of addressing climate change, the leader stated that: We have been against priests but in support of female priests; from now we will also be against popes but in support of climate popes (Leder, 2015, p. 2).
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Appendix A – Remarks on Codebook Search Words
The Norwegian search words which were used to find and identify the articles which were coded were as follows:
Global warming: “global oppvarming”, “globale oppvarmingen”
Climate change: “klimaendring”, “klimaendringer”, “klimaendringene”, “klimaforandring”, “klimaforandringer”, “klimaforandringene”
Greenhouse effect: “drivhuseffekt”, “drivhuseffekten”. Climate: «klima».
The reason for several search phrases especially for climate change was because the search engine was sensitive to the way the concept was phrased and conjugated.
Part I
3. Using letters instead of numbers was here used to reduce the potential mix up of the date. 5. Article size was measured in this way because the search engine did not offer any word count. The choice of excluding the picture from the size measure was to get the result closer to the actual amount of text.
8. Green politics could be added as a topic, as this seemed to be the relevant category for several of the articles coded with “other”.
Part II
9. Article author could have been included as a category to make it easier to add up the total number for the following items.
13. Additional categories could have been included to capture more of the nuance in the public discourse. Some other solutions that were mentioned in the newspaper articles were: (1) oil and gas is going to be needed for many years to come and we have a cleaner production of it, stopping the production will increase coal production elsewhere in the world versus arguments of how production must be downscaled or shut down; (2) radical societal changes; (3) gradual measures or reforms. (3) reduce meat consumption versus arguments of how the emissions are low since the animals feed in the mountains and therefore do not take up much space; (4) circular economy; (5) reduced population growth.
16. Other countries and intergovernmental organizations could have been two independent categories, to better capture the nuance between blaming others versus highlighting the importance of intergovernmental cooperation.
Appendix B – Codebook Introduction
The purpose of this study is to investigate the climate change coverage in three Norwegian national newspapers in the timeframe 2013 - 2019. The main focus is on how the newspapers balance different opinions and arguments, for example by including actors who argue for anthropogenic climate change (human activity contributes to climate change) with actors who argue against this notion. Other ways of balancing are for instance related to immediate or cautious actions, mandatory or voluntary actions, and disagreements of who should bear responsibility to act against climate change (e.g. individuals, companies, politicians).
The codebook has two sections and each item must be answered. Part 1 covers more general information, where one does not need to go too deep into the substance of the article (as author, year, article size). Part 2 entails mostly counting the number of actors who are included with opinions regarding each item, and therefore demands more thorough reading of what is said in the article.
Part 1: General Information 1. Article number: - [1 – 336] 2. Newspaper: - 1. VG, 2. Dagbladet, 3. Aftenposten 3. Date:
a. Day: Monday - Sunday b. Month: January - December c. Year: 2013 - 2019
4. Author[s]:
a. Name: Initials, last name (e.g. c.i.hagen)
b. Gender: 1. female, 2. male, 3. both genders, 4. unknown
If it only states “leader”, “anonymous”, or something equivalent, then use that as the author’s name and unknown as gender.
5. Article size excluding pictures: 1. A2+ (more than two pages) 2. A2 (two pages)
3. A3 (one page) 4. A4 (half page) 5. A5 (quarter page) 6. A6 (one eight page)
6. Article type:
1. News article, news report, news notice 2. Commentary, opinion article, interview 3. Review (book, movie, etc.)
4. Fact box 5. Other 7. World scope: 1. Norway 2. International 3. Both
Each newspaper page is here counted as A3. Add each part of text from each side, with approximate measures and round off the total amount upwards. E.g. a three-page article with half a page text on each side equals one and a half page and is rounded up to A2. A short article with a bit more than A6 is rounded up to A5.
➢ (1) News are about Norway. For example, about the oil minister handing out licenses to search for oil, or a discussion about the subsidies for electric cars.
➢ (2) News are about happenings outside of Norway, where Norway or Norwegian actors are not explicitly mentioned.
➢ (3) News cover both international happenings and Norway, for instance that Norwegian actors (e.g. politicians, companies) attend an international conference or comment about a happening in another country (e.g. natural disaster, other governments’ climate actions). 8. What is the main topic related to climate change? (select only one)
1. Global warming, climate change, carbon emissions, greenhouse gases and quotas
2. Forestry, land use, farming 3. Ocean pollution (e.g. plastic) 4. Freshwater
5. Phosphorus, nitrogen 6. Chemicals
7. Biodiversity (e.g. wolves, fish)
8. Natural disaster (e.g. forest fires, droughts, floods, climate refugees)
9. Renewable-related (e.g. solar panels, electric cars, hydrogen, carbon capture)
10. Nuclear power (e.g. uranium, thorium) 11. Oil
12. Economy, business 13. Other
If the main topic is not about the climate, use the most important climate connection. If no connection, and the search word is mentioned only once e.g. while listing topics at a conference, select “other”. If several categories seem to be the main topic, select the one mentioned first in the article.
Part 2: Different Opinions
9. How many actors are included, apart from the article author(s), with their opinion on climate change?
a. Political
b. NGOs – non-governmental organizations c. Companies
d. Experts e. Celebrity f. Individuals
➢ Including someone’s opinion is here understood as an actor being directly or indirectly quoted with arguments on climate change. For instance, the Environmental Department may be directly quoted stating that “people must fly less to reduce their carbon footprints”, or indirectly with “the Environmental Department stated yesterday that people must fly less in order to reduce their personal carbon emissions”. An actor who is just mentioned, without indirect or direct quotes with arguments on climate change, is not to be counted.
➢ (A) Politicians, ministers, state agencies, intergovernmental organizations (states as members). Examples of state agencies: Forskningsrådet, Utlendingsnemnda, Forbrukerrådet, NAV, Miljødepartementet. Examples of intergovernmental organizations: United Nations, European Union, NATO, Arctic Council.
➢ (B) If a person explicitly represents an NGO (organizations where states are not members) and speaks on their behalf. E.g. Gunhild Stordalen speaking on behalf of EAT about sustainable food. Examples of NGOs: Greenpeace, Zero, Bellona, EAT, Red Cross.
➢ (C) If a person explicitly represents a company and speaks on behalf of it. E.g. Equinor’s CEO speaking about what Equinor thinks about climate change and what they do about it. ➢ (D) Experts are often categorized as experts in the articles and must be labeled as such (or
equivalent, such as academician, professor, scientist, meteorologist, expert committee) to be counted. People working for Cicero, IPCC, Meteorologisk Institutt, StormGeo are considered as experts.
➢ (E) Celebrities are here understood as people famous for example through acting, singing, or media, such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Greta Thunberg, Gunhild Stordalen (when she is not explicitly representing EAT).
10. How many actors support or challenges the view of anthropogenic climate change? a. Support
b. Challenge
➢ The anthropogenic view builds on three facets: A) that global warming has taken place; B) that the global warming is to a high degree caused by human activity and emissions; and C) that we must reduce emissions to avoid further damage and irreversible changes. The first two are often taken as given, and one may come with arguments such as “climate change is a big problem” or that “we have to reduce our carbon emissions”. Mentioning climate change or global warming without voicing any skepticism is considered as support. ➢ Challenger: the actor explicitly challenges at least one of the mentioned facets. For instance: (A) one argues that warm years are caused by natural variations (“the summer in ’76 was also warm, different from year to year”); (B) one acknowledges that the global temperatures have increased, but one argues for instance that it is because of natural cycles, sun activity, that the causes are unknown, or that human influence is minimal or
non-existent; or (C) one acknowledges that humans contribute to global warming but argue that the increased temperature not necessarily bears negative consequences – at least not compared to the costs of reducing emissions. The same goes for those who question the actual consequences of climate change, whether reducing greenhouse gas emissions has any effect at all, one may voice skepticism or deficiencies in the climate models made by scientists, or that humans may contribute to some changes but not many.
11. Who are the skeptics? (the ones challenging facet A - C above).
a. Initials, last name, facet challenged (e.g. c.i.hagen:b, s.jensen:c)
➢ Since the facets build on each other, only specify the lowest one (a = lowest). E.g., if one does not believe in global warming (A), one also does not believe that human activity contributes (B) or that we must reduce our emissions to avoid higher temperatures (C). b. Negatively framed
➢ Count the number of skeptics who are framed in a clearly negative way, where they are directly or indirectly quoted in a negative light to undermine their arguments. If there are cases where this goes the other way, where a skeptical actor quotes someone with the anthropogenic view and puts them in a negative way, use negative numbers.
12. How many actors argue that the climate change prospects primarily are: a. Positive
b. Negative
c. Neutral, not mentioned
➢ Count the number of actors who: (A) are optimistic that everything will turn out well, that there will not be much climate change, or that we are able to reduce enough emissions in
good time, e.g. “we know what we gotta do, and we can do it”; (B) are pessimistic about the future, who argue that the climate changes will be irreversible or that time is too limited to avoid vast damages. (C) are neutral to the future or does not mention it.
13. How many actors argue that the main solution to climate change is: a. Reducing emissions now
b. Upcoming technologies and developments
c. Both reducing emissions now and upcoming technologies d. Other, not mentioned
➢ Count the number of actors who argue that the main solution is: (A) reducing emissions here and now – one cannot take for granted that upcoming technologies will solve the climate problems; (B) upcoming technologies and developments (e.g. carbon capture, hydrogen-vehicles, thorium) – reducing emissions now is not considered as urgent, maybe even too costly; (C) the solution is focused on both reducing emissions now and the importance of emerging technologies; (D) ‘other’ could for instance be to talk about a need for a general transition without specifying what needs to be done.
14. How many actors argue that climate actions should primarily be: a. Voluntary
b. Mandatory
c. Both voluntary and mandatory d. Not mentioned
➢ Count the number of actors who argue that climate actions should primarily be: (A) voluntary, only recommended; (B) mandatory, through law, fines, taxes; or (C) focused on both voluntary and mandatory actions.
15. How many actors argue that the climate actions should primarily be implemented: a. Immediately
b. Cautiously
c. Both immediate and cautious d. Not mentioned
➢ Count the number of actors who argue that climate change actions should be implemented: (A) immediately, faster, now; (B) cautiously, over time, without much haste, later; or (C) with a focus on both immediate and cautious actions.
16. How many actors impose the main responsibility of addressing climate change to? a. Other countries, intergovernmental organizations
b. Actor’s own country c. Politicians
d. Companies e. Celebrities f. Individuals
g. Other, not mentioned
➢ If an actor mentions more than one of these categories, select the category that is mentioned most frequently by that actor. If equal frequency, select the first mentioned category.
