‘Like the Oceans We Rise’: News Frames on Youth for Climate

Abstract

In early 2019, following the example of the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, youth-led climate movements around the world demonstrated massively and persistently for a more ambitious climate policy. News media gave extensive coverage to the climate activists; given that the demonstrations were mostly on school days, public debates on young people’s rights, obligations and political agency were tense and polarized. In this article we take Belgium as a case study and discuss how the Youth for Climate movement was framed in four Dutch-speaking newspapers. Based on an inductive and deductive frame analysis of 126 newspaper articles, we found six frames. Most of the frames tend to challenge persistent views of young people’s political agency, whereas remarkably few support the idea that young people are unfit for politics.