Sustainable media events? Production and discursive effects of staged global political media events in the area of climate change

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Hartmut Wessler
• Subject Area: Communication Sciences
• Term: from 2012 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 209280825

This project analyzes the production of staged global political media events and their impact on national media debates. It integrates two research perspectives that have remained unconnected so far: research on staged media events in the context of transnational strategic communication on the one hand and research on global public spheres and national media debates on the other. In doing so it uses a third approach, namely research on the role of events in producing frame change in the media. The project applies these perspectives to the annual UN climate conferences and their coverage in five important democratic countries around the globe (the United States, Germany, India, South Africa, and Brazil). Module 1 of the project analyzes the communicative production of the climate summits via interviews and non-participant observation of central actors on-site (communication professionals of government delegations and NGOs as well as journalists). The analysis shows that the image projected globally of the climate conferences is co-produced in particular by transnational environmental NGOs and journalists. This finding will be further corroborated in a standardized survey at the climate conference in Paris in 2015. Module 2 uses comparative media content analysis to investigate the framing in national climate coverage as well as possible discursive effects of the conferences in terms of the extent of cross-references between the five countries and a possible convergence of issue frames. The study has already shown that country differences in framing the conferences are relatively small so that a global discourse has evolved around the conferences. Further analysis will use semi-automated content analysis to gauge possible long-term effects of individual framing elements on national coverage between and after conferences.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants