Climate change is one of the most important challenges we face, and we knew we could present a new angle on Australia’s climate change discourse. In conversation with RMIT’s Circular Economy Hub, we identified an opportunity to analyse Australia’s media reporting on climate change over the past three decades.
By: Campbell McNolty, Sai Gitte, Mondo Kad, Brad Crammond, Elise Stephenson, Akvan Gajanayake, Kristen Moeller-saxone, Alexandra Wake and Wendy Steele
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Key findings
As a group, we took up the challenge and formed an inter-disciplinary team to analyse an enormous dataset of text media.
We used a machine learning technique, called topic modelling, to take a different approach to answering our broad research question: “What are the most important problems we are grappling with as a society and how are those challenges reflected in the media?”.
We know that the scale of the problem requires innovating with new methods and materials, so we set out to explore the public conversation as it is represented in the mainstream news media and understand the diverse approaches used to communicate the impacts of climate change on society and community.
Climate change reporting may be considered gender neutral, but considerable research shows that gender plays a role in how climate change is reported and whose opinions and expertise is quoted.
We find that there are almost twice as many articles about climate change authored by men as compared to women. This contrasts with the Australian journalism profession where women have outnumbered men since 2015.
While gender differences may be at least partly driven by the difference between the way that men and women are affected by climate change, it is also clear that more research is needed how and why these gendered differences play out, as well as to what effect.
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