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The agenda-setting and attitude-forming role of media has been proven and endorsed over time. Media has played an instrumental role in the way the issue of climate change is perceived by various stakeholders in society. Although studies on media coverage of climate issues have been gaining prominence in recent years, there is a gap when people consider the Global South. Moreover, although the business sector is a critical stakeholder in climate change policy and action, studies that focus on how business media projects and highlights climate change are relatively sparse. This vacuum is even more pronounced in developing countries. This research is an attempt to address this gap. A longitudinal analysis of climate change reporting in a leading Indian business newspaper, using automated content analysis was conducted. Results provide us with valuable insights about how climate frames and climate themes have evolved over time in business media.
The study’s objective was to investigate climate change themes in business newspapers and map the temporal evolution of such compositions. Therefore, the researchers decided to focus only on business newspapers with extensive digital archives. Therefore, the researchers chose India’s most prominent business daily, the ‘Economic Times,’ as a single unit for the study. The researchers crawled all the news articles from the digital archives of The Economic Times between 2008 and 2021 based on the keyword search ‘climate change’. The researchers chose this time period because India’s domestic climate action began in 2008 with the launch of the ‘National Climate Change Plan’. Until then, India’s stance on climate change was more outward looking and driven by climate justice considerations.
The findings suggest that while climate cooperation is a prominent topic in business media, however, it has been declining in recent years. On the other hand, the share of domestic news covering sector specific issues is increasing, mirroring India’s change in stance. A critical insight from the analysis is the increasing media attention on climate change over the last decade, even in the Indian business daily that the researchers covered. Within the context of the study’s results, climate news has increased on a year-on-year basis and confirms the findings of other prior studies. For example, Schmidt et al. (2013) recorded that in the second half of 2000, media attention increased by a factor of 2.9 compared to the late 1990s in India. The results show a much higher increase in coverage of climate issues, almost six times higher as compared to Schmidt et al. (2013). The higher media coverage can be considered as evidence of the growing importance of climate change in domestic affairs. Although media attention continues to increase sharply around international events such as COPs, as supported by an earlier study by Keller et al. (2020), The findings also provide evidence an increased coverage motivated by local factors. Another notable pattern is the decline in the share of climate news driven by international factors such as COPs, giving way to a higher share of domestic news across all the themes except ‘climate cooperation’. There could be several reasons for these shifts in attention as well as issue framing. Over the last decade, India’s political stance has evolved from considering climate change as a ‘risk-responsibility’ issue to that of an equal stakeholder, thus promoting domestic sectoral changes. We, however, also have to acknowledge the strategic push for climate action at the national level that facilitated this transition. Therefore, although climate action may not have emerged as one of the most prominent themes in the research by itself, it is clearly visible as significantly impacting sectoral action in this direction. Action plans have continually been promoted as contributing to public health and energy security