| This study, employing a combination of political economy of mass media and strategic frame analysis, posits that environmental information pertaining to global warming is treated the way political and economic information is handled within a propaganda model of news presentation. The study derived data from U.S. and international news media sources for the years 1993-2003, employing an inductive-deductive form of analysis. The inductive component of the research involved article coding and data analysis performed within a methodological framework of content analysis. The deductive component revolved around research questions that guided the assessment of the content and framing of information about global warming within news media stories, examining both media and individual framing of climate change.;Examining the media frame and the questions associated with it involved ordered logistic regression, analyzing the influence of sources and article content on the frame. Analysis of the individual framing of global warming entailed a rigorous examination of patterns of media coverage that emerged from detailed note-taking and data coding for each article.;Within U.S. and Western nation-state news media, skepticism as to the reality of global warming is a significant factor in the framing of global warming. The findings of this study support previous research regarding the efforts of elites to render global warming as a non-problem, both socially and environmentally. Despite the ever-growing inclusion of proponents of the scientific consensus in news reports, the overall frame trend remains one of contention between thematic and episodic framing within U.S. news media. International coverage, exclusive of the U.S., is slightly more thematic in terms of the overall media frame, though other states' news media are also subject to the influence of the skeptic frame paradigm.;With respect to individual frame trends, economic and political frame paradigms dominate, owing to the focus of coverage on Kyoto and other policy considerations addressing efforts to mitigate global warming's effects. The news media's framing of global warming, in terms of both the media and individual frames, centers on theoretical arguments over mitigation of a phenomenon that in reality is already taking place and affecting our planet. |
