Climate Change Coverage in the Hungarian News Media (2014—2024) – The Impacts of Youth-Led Climate Activism on the Media Agenda [before doctoral defense]

Kivonat, rövid leírás

Climate change has developed from a predominantly scientific concern into a widely mediated, politically contested and socially consequential public issue. News media are central to this process because they influence which aspects of climate change become visible, how often the issue appears, which actors gain attention, and how causes, consequences and possible responses are interpreted. Agenda-setting research provides a framework for examining changes in issue visibility over time (McCombs & Shaw, 1972; McCombs, 2005), while framing research draws attention to the interpretative choices through which particular aspects of an issue are selected and emphasized (Entman, 1993; Nisbet, 2009). Climate change is especially relevant for longitudinal media research because attention to the issue is uneven. Coverage often rises around international negotiations, scientific reports, extreme weather events, political conflicts and protest waves, and can then decline when other issues take over the news agenda (Downs, 1972; Anderson, 2009; Hase et al., 2021). The issue-attention cycle is therefore useful for interpreting fluctuations, but climate communication research also shows that attention does not necessarily follow one fixed or predictable cycle (Anderson, 2009). Longitudinal analysis is valuable because it can reveal not only major peaks but also longer-term shifts, declines and periods of comparatively low visibility (Hase et al., 2021; Meier & Eskjær, 2024).