How do the media affect public perception of climate change and geohazards? An Italian case study

This paper uses a combination of a qualitative approach and a quantitative, software-based approach to explore the Italian print media construction of climate change and geohazards between 2007 and 2010. We have broken down our analysis in two sections: the first one deals with the coverage of climate change; the second one focuses on the media representation of hydrogeological hazards and extreme events in Italy.Our software-based, qualitative and quantitative analysis of 1253 storylines from two major Italian broadsheets (the La Repubblica and the Corriere della Sera) has enabled us to assess the presence of typical journalistic frames such as conflict and dramatization, as well as newly-introduced ones such as “prevention vs damages”, and “weather vs climate”. Our results show that the two newspapers appear to have different “agendas” that might have different impacts on their own readerships: the La Repubblica has been on the forefront of forging a broad public consensus on the need for actions aimed at tackling climate change, whereas the Corriere della Sera has gradually built a journalistic agenda aimed at minimizing the urgency of the climate change problem.As regards the media's representation of hydrogeological hazards, we have confirmed what assessed by previous research, i.e. that Italian journalists still prefer to focus on damages rather than prevention; on a better note, the tendency of the Italian press to confuse weather with climate, blaming climate change for extreme rainfalls causing landslides and floods, has decreased in the last four years.

Research highlights
► We have explored the Italian print media construction of climate change and geohazards.
► Our study has used both a qualitative approach and a quantitative, software-based approach.
► The two analyzed newspapers are biased toward supporting either climate change “catastrophists” or “dissidents”.
► Both newspapers downplay the role of potential individual actions to counteract global warming.
► The Italian print media tend to cover stories of disasters rather than focusing on risk prevention and mitigation.