Mediating the Science: Symbolic and Structural Influences on Communicating Climate Change Through New Zealand's Television News

Climate change presents scientists, politicians, and media producers with a challenge of articulating to diverse stakeholders both the complexity of issues and the urgency of action. Analyses of how climate change is represented and constructed in broadcast media are useful to capture a reflection of contemporary values. We use an analysis of news frames and production values as well as a limited “circuit of culture” approach to explore climate change communication as both a news product and cultural phenomenon. Our focus is New Zealand, a country which ratified the Kyoto agreement but which is currently noncompliant. Using qualitative framing analysis and in-depth interviews with leading media producers, politicians, and scientists, we examine how climate change is produced, represented, and consumed by New Zealanders via their broadcast media.     

YouTube,Social Norms and Perceived Salience of Climate Change in the American Mind

This online experiment explored how contextual information embedded in new media channels such as YouTube may serve as normative social cues to users. Specifically, we examined whether the number of views listed under a YouTube video about climate change would elicit inferences regarding how “others” feel about the climate issue and, consequently, might influence perceptions of issue salience. Participants in this experiment were exposed to a YouTube video about climate change using two experimental conditions, one providing a small number of views under the video and the second listing a large number of views. Results suggest that the “number of views” cue did, indeed, influence participant perceptions of the importance assigned by other Americans to the issue of climate change. Further, compared to low self-monitoring participants, high self-monitoring participants registered an increase in their own judgment of issue importance.     

Rebirth,Devastation and Sickness: Analyzing the Role of Metaphor in Media Discourses of Nuclear Power

Nuclear power plays an important but controversial role in policies to ensure domestic energy security, fuel poverty reduction and the mitigation of climate change. Our article construes the problem of nuclear power in terms of social discourse, language and public choice; specifically examining the role that metaphors play in the policy domain. We empirically analyze metaphors as framing devices in nuclear energy policy debates in the UK between April 2009 and March 2013, thereby capturing the impact of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. We employ documentary analysis of major UK national broadsheet and tabloid newspapers, using electronic bibliographic tools to extract the metaphors. We then map these metaphors using a Type Hierarchy Analysis, which examines how elements of the target domain (energy technologies and policies) originate from a different source domain. Type hierarchies identify and categorize metaphors, defining the affectual and emotional responses associated with them, providing us with grounded insight into their role in shaping discourse and as a consequence influence public engagement with energy policy. Our analysis highlights three emergent domains of discourse metaphors and discusses the implications of their deployment. Metaphors were found to be classified into three different categories: Rebirth (Renaissance), Devastation (Apocalypse, Inferno, Genie and Bomb) and Sickness (Addiction and Smoking).     

Who is the Adolescent Environmentalist? Environmental Attitudes,Identity, Media Usage and Communication Orientation

There has been an increase in scholarly attention to adolescents’ environmental attitudes; however, only a small number of empirical studies address the Adolescent Environmentalist’s (AE) personal and collective identity, media usage, and communication orientation. In this study, we investigate differences in young people (aged 12–17) who identify themselves as environmentalists, or the AEs, and those who do not drawing from a national sample of 1096 youth. Results show AEs significantly differ from their peers. The AEs have a different environmental value set, report greater self-confidence and influence among peers, support the stronger display of citizenship behaviors, follow certain news topics more, use and discuss the news more with a variety of others, and report engaging in more dialogue and persuasion.     

燃煤电厂对过滤材料的要求及其解决方案

随着燃煤电厂烟尘排放标准的日益严格,发展袋式除尘器改成为必然趋势。通过对我国燃煤电厂烟气成分和工况条件的分析,提出了采用新型PPS复合滤料及改进的玻璃纤维覆膜滤料的方案可以满足燃煤电厂袋式除尘器所需滤料的要求。     

填料-生物转盘处理有机模拟污水

针对传统生物转盘启动慢、挂膜性能差、水力停留时间长等缺点,采用英国某生物技术公司研制的新型填料复合式生物转盘处理有机模拟污水,考察水力停留时间、转盘转速、有机负荷等因素对工艺运行效果的影响。结果表明,新型生物转盘启动快,微生物相变化明显,微生物量大,挂膜效率高;抗负荷冲击能力强,有机负荷大幅度变化对其影响较小;二级转笼处有机负荷相对较低,溶解氧高,微生物的种类、数量均比一级转笼多;该转盘处理有机模拟污水的最优水力停留时间为1.5 h,最佳转速为12.4 r/min,较传统生物转盘污水处理量大,且污水COD去除率高达97%,大大降低运行能耗,出水水质达到城镇污水处理厂污染物排放标准(GB18918-2002)中的一级A标准。     

Democratic Debate and Mediated Discourses on Climate Change: From Consensus to De/politicization

Starting from a risk conflicts perspective, this article challenges two common assumptions of existing research on climate change in public and media discourses. It argues that the evaluation of these discourses on the extent to which these either accurately reflect a scientific consensus or contribute to achieving social consensus insufficiently takes account of the exclusionary mechanisms it starts from. A conceptual and empirical framework is subsequently put forward which allows one to evaluate mediated discourses in terms of the extent to which democratic debate and citizenship are encouraged. Such analysis can reveal the discursive strategies underlying processes of politicization and depoliticization. This perspective is illustrated by an analysis of a local case study: the “Sing for the Climate” campaign. We conclude by calling for a broad systematic research agenda revealing the extent to which de/politicizing discourses are found to influence public and media discourses.     

Media and Climate Change: Four Long-standing Research Challenges Revisited

This paper suggests some further avenues of empirical and theoretical investigation for media research on climate change. “Old” suggestions, whose significance, as we see it, needs to be further reinforced, are included, as are “new” ones, which we hope will generate innovative research questions. In order to integrate the analysis with knowledge generated by media research at large, we revisit four research challenges that media scholars have long grappled with in the investigation of journalism: (1) the discursive challenge, i.e. the production, content and reception of media discourse; (2) the interdisciplinary challenge, i.e. how media research might engage in productive collaboration with other disciplines; (3) the international challenge, i.e. how to achieve a more diverse and complex understanding of news reporting globally; and (4) the practical challenge, i.e. how to reduce the theory–practice divide in media research.     

异质性企业环境责任与碳绩效的关系研究：媒体关注和环境规制的联合调节效应

“双碳”愿景下微观企业层面的环境责任受到更多关注。本文运用Python获取2014—2019年中国A股上市工业企业数据,分析了异质性企业环境责任对碳绩效的影响,探讨了媒体关注和环境规制在其中的联合调节效应。研究表明：履行前瞻型环境责任和反应型环境责任均对企业碳绩效有显著的增进作用;媒体关注可以正向调节前瞻型企业环境责任和碳绩效的关系,但在反应型企业环境责任与碳绩效间的调节作用不显著。进一步研究发现：环境规制与媒体关注在反应型企业环境责任和碳绩效间产生正向联合调节作用,而在前瞻型环境责任与碳绩效间的联合调节作用不显著。研究结果支持了政府和媒体对企业环境责任的正式和非正式治理效果,进而提高了企业碳绩效的作用逻辑,拓展了对企业碳绩效影响因素以及异质性企业环境责任的理论研究,将环境治理他治和自治相结合,为多元环境治理主体协同联动推进“双碳”目标顺利实现提供新思路和参考证据。     

Sentiment analysis of the Twitter response to Netflix's Our Planet documentary

The role of nature documentaries in shaping public attitudes and behavior toward conservation and wildlife issues is unclear. We analyzed the emotional content of over 2 million tweets related to Our Planet, a major nature documentary released on Netflix, with dictionary and rule-based automatic sentiment analysis. We also compared the sentiment associated with species mentioned in Our Planet and a set of control species with similar features but not mentioned in the documentary. Tweets were largely negative in sentiment at the time of release of the series. This effect was primarily linked to the highly skewed distributions of retweets and, in particular, to a single negatively valenced and massively retweeted tweet (>150,000 retweets). Species mentioned in Our Planet were associated with more negative sentiment than the control species, and this effect coincided with a short period following the airing of the series. Our results are consistent with a general negativity bias in cultural transmission and document the difficulty of evoking positive sentiment, on social media and elsewhere, in response to environmental problems.