Leaving the Paris Climate Agreement – Historical Setback or No Impact? : A Comparative Framing Analysis of U.S. and German Newspaper Coverage

Sammanfattning: Donald Trump’s announcement on June 1st, 2017, to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement generated widespread news coverage. In this qualitative framing study, a selection of articles published on that topic in the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the American New York Times are analyzed with respect to generic news frames, issue-specific frames, actor-statements, and images. The most frequently used news frames were economic consequences, conflict, and responsibility. The morality frame appeared only twice, whereas the human interest frame was not evident in the verbal text at all, but occurred in one image. Two issue-specific frames emerged, the setback frame, evident in the majority of articles, cast Trump’s decision as a momentous setback for the U.S. and the global fight against climate change. The contradictory no impact frame implied that the Paris Agreement has many problems as is, and the U.S. withdrawal will have no impact on the state of the climate. The images accompanying the articles were shown to support the verbal issue-specific framing of the articles, whereas no clear relation could be found connecting certain types of actor-statements with the presence of a certain frame.