Silence and Privileged Voices in Media Discourses: Climate Change and Social Capital Dataset
Description
The study utilized a dataset to investigate the media's portrayal and reaction to the COP26 conference in Glasgow in 2021, with a focus on its significance in shaping public discourse. It concentrated on the pivotal first week of the event, from October 31st to November 6th, 2021, employing both qualitative and quantitative research methods to analyze media narratives. The researchers conducted qualitative content analysis to identify detailed patterns, themes, and insights in the coverage. Concurrently, they investigated statistical correlations among these themes, the referenced sources and voices, and the solutions the news stories proposed. This combined approach aimed to integrate the depth of qualitative analysis with the objectivity of quantitative data. For a comprehensive perspective, the study analyzed articles from four leading news outlets: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Herald. These outlets were chosen for their unique editorial perspectives and their ability to provide insights at both the global and local levels. Using specific keywords, the research team collected articles from the Gale OneFile Complete database, focusing exclusively on hard news stories and excluding opinion pieces and editorials. Despite initial differences in the number of articles provided by each outlet (which varied from 70 to 90), the research standardized the data by selecting a uniform sample of 50 articles from each outlet, resulting in a total of 200 articles. The team employed systematic sampling to achieve this selection, ensuring the study's methodological soundness and rigor. The study was guided by several research questions: RQ1: Which themes recurrently manifest in the outlets’ news coverage of climate change at COP26? RQ2: What solutions are prevalent in the outlets’ news coverage of climate change at COP26? RQ3: Which news sources are most cited in the climate change coverage of COP26 by each of the four selected newspapers? RQ4: Does The Herald’s local coverage offer a unique perspective or narrative compared to the elite newspapers, The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Washington Post? These questions aimed to dissect the complexities of media coverage on climate change during COP26, examining prevalent themes, solutions, and cited sources, as well as comparing the local perspective of The Herald with the broader viewpoints of its more globally-focused counterparts.