BIO

Ashleigh Kairalla is in her second year at Florida State University. She is majoring in Political Science and is minoring in International Affairs. After she graduates, she plans on going into law school. When she is not busy working, she can usually be found with her dog and a good book. Ashleigh deeply enjoys the work that she is doing with UROP and hopes to continue with research in the future.

Into the Media's Framing of Climate Change

Abstract

This research attempts to convey an understanding of how the media has changed in its coverage of climate change in the past 15 years. Utilizing transcripts from cable news networks, this work analyzes the tonality, coverage, and focus of different news networks concerning climate change over time. In particular, it analyzes the differences in language used by partisan news networks concerning this topic. This research finds that, over time, news networks have begun to be more accepting of the concept of climate change and, oftentimes, partisan news networks – both left and right-leaning – attempt to use this crystalized issue in order to appeal to their supporters – although their language is considerably different. This research project is currently still ongoing.

Keywords: Climate change, political science, news