{"title":"Media coverage of climate activist groups in Germany.","authors":"Fabian Dablander, Simon Wimmer, Jonas Haslbeck","doi":"10.1007/s10584-025-03959-8","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Climate activist groups aim to address climate change by informing citizens about its risks and potential solutions, and by providing a way for citizens to engage in collective action to change policy. The effectiveness of climate activist groups, some of which engage in disruptive protests, is influenced by how they are portrayed by the news media. Using frequency analysis and GPT-4, we analysed all online news articles from major German newspapers in 2022 and 2023 about the two most prominent climate activist groups, Fridays for Future and Last Generation. A substantial proportion of the articles provides little information about the risks and solutions of climate change, especially when reporting on the more disruptive Last Generation compared to Fridays for Future, which primarily engages in legal protest. Last Generation is also portrayed more negatively, as more violent, and as more polarising. Right-leaning newspapers provide the least information about climate change and portray activist groups most negatively. We discuss the implications of our results for the media, activist groups, and future research.</p>","PeriodicalId":10372,"journal":{"name":"Climatic Change","volume":"178 8","pages":"144"},"PeriodicalIF":4.8000,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12287173/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Climatic Change","FirstCategoryId":"93","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-025-03959-8","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2025/7/23 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Climate activist groups aim to address climate change by informing citizens about its risks and potential solutions, and by providing a way for citizens to engage in collective action to change policy. The effectiveness of climate activist groups, some of which engage in disruptive protests, is influenced by how they are portrayed by the news media. Using frequency analysis and GPT-4, we analysed all online news articles from major German newspapers in 2022 and 2023 about the two most prominent climate activist groups, Fridays for Future and Last Generation. A substantial proportion of the articles provides little information about the risks and solutions of climate change, especially when reporting on the more disruptive Last Generation compared to Fridays for Future, which primarily engages in legal protest. Last Generation is also portrayed more negatively, as more violent, and as more polarising. Right-leaning newspapers provide the least information about climate change and portray activist groups most negatively. We discuss the implications of our results for the media, activist groups, and future research.
期刊介绍:
Climatic Change is dedicated to the totality of the problem of climatic variability and change - its descriptions, causes, implications and interactions among these. The purpose of the journal is to provide a means of exchange among those working in different disciplines on problems related to climatic variations. This means that authors have an opportunity to communicate the essence of their studies to people in other climate-related disciplines and to interested non-disciplinarians, as well as to report on research in which the originality is in the combinations of (not necessarily original) work from several disciplines. The journal also includes vigorous editorial and book review sections.