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This article traces the origins of the term of the green shift, which gained increased cultural, social and political traction in Norway after it was introduced in 2015 by journalist Anders Bjartnes, editor of Energi og klima (2011-). By looking at this outlet as well as two other contemporary niche media, Harvest (2013-) and Naturpress (2016-), we show how this term provided a way of working with frequency, one of the 12 news values outlined in Galtung and Ruge’s seminal study from 1965. Inspired by discourse-historical analysis, we base our article on interviews with the editors of the three outlets, their journalistic output as well as on contextual material in order to show how the slow, uneven, global and partially invisible process of climate change was given a different temporal frame through the notion of the green shift. By addressing notions of frequency in relation to a specific time and context, we speak, on the one hand, to discussions about how an event-driven journalism struggles with the complex temporalities of climate change and, on the other, to recurrent calls for providing a more “context-driven reflection on the value and legacy of Galtung and Ruge” [Joye, Stijn, Ansgard Heinrich, and Romy Wöhler. 2016. “50 Years of Galtung and Ruge: Reflections on Their Model of News Values and its Relevance for the Study of Journalism and Communication Today.” CM Komunikacija i Mmediji 36: 5–28]. This work was supported by Norges forskningsråd: [Grant Number 283345].

In 2019, mentions of “oil worker” in Norwegian newspaper coverage of climate change more than quadrupled, mostly reflecting a rise in politicians vying for the support of this critical constituency. This article explores the rise of the oil worker in newspaper coverage in the period 2017–2021, identifying the main agents of change in the dominant narratives and demonstrating that agency tends to be ascribed to politicians rather than to the oil workers themselves, despite an outpouring of “thank-yous” to those workers for their contribution to society. We also distinguish between the various ways in which oil workers have been framed as heroes and find that newspapers in the Western part of the country portrayed oil workers as “national income heroes”, while left-wing papers attached a sense of pride to the social democratic history of the oil industry. Opinions were more polarized on the potential for oil workers to become climate heroes. While some suggested a conditional form of heroism, the “heroes of tomorrow”, based on the willingness of the workers to transition, others focused on the bravery of oil workers in seeking dialogue with their counterparts in the climate debate and thus becoming the “heroes of couples therapy”. This work was supported by Norges Forskningsråd: [grant number 283345].

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread rapidly across the globe, and yet media coverage of the pandemic has decreased since the initial flurry of attention received during the beginning of the crisis in early 2020. Despite this decrease, public attention to the COVID-19 pandemic remains high, relative to the public’s attention to other issues, and appears to have largely been supplanted and displaced rather than combined and connected with the attention paid to climate change and other societal challenges. Connections between COVID-19 and climate change, among many intersectional challenges, are varied and complex, and merit further attention in the public sphere.

Framing is a widely used concept in research on communication and climate change. From a Gramscian realist position, this article criticizes underlying assumptions in the framing paradigm itself. The article examines how frames are defined, understood, and theorized in key texts on Anglo-American framing and uses examples from the scholarly literature on climate change communication and the Norwegian media to argue that global warming should not be posed primarily as a question of framing. It argues that the framing paradigm suffers from three main problems: (1) anthropocentrism; (2) a strategic approach to truth; and (3) an underestimation of the importance of latent meaning. Instead of communicative attempts by framing scholars to resonate with a plurality of already manifest, already culturally resonant and already familiar frames in public discourse, the essay suggests that global warming is an ethical challenge which communication scholars can best help solve with a combination of natural realism and...

To isolate advocacy and objectivity in journalism as an object of study is fraught with difficulties. It may be slightly easier to get a grip on norms and values if we consider what they are about. This article explores journalistic professional values and ethics as they come to the fore in student discussions around global warming in Nicaragua, Nepal and Bangladesh. We find that their scientific knowledge and local experience must both be taken into account to explain their concern over global warming. We also find the students leaning towards advocacy positions, although they are also attracted by the research credentials of objectivity. Reflecting on the findings as journalism teachers, we propose a ‘realist-constructivist’ pedagogical approach, arguing that if scientific understandings are to prompt the kind of social change necessary to avert worst case scenarios of global warming, they must somehow be connected to the concerns of everyday life.

This article presents an analysis of two major Norwegian newspapers’ coverage of a major transnational media event—the Bali Climate Summit in December 2007. Climate Summits are seen as ample opportunities to study journalism at the global level and simultaneously the relation between global and local perspectives. It demonstrates how main national actors within the political field exercise their hegemony toward the press and that the Norwegian leaders in Bali are partly framed as global heroes. But it furthermore reveals how a critical scrutiny of Norway’s role as a major oil polluter emerges in the press in opposition to the hero framing. Thus, a distinction between different modes of journalistic domestication is made, which invites more critical scrutiny of Climate Change actors both within the confines of the nation-state and more globally. The investigation is based on textual analysis as well as framing theory—and on perspectives of hegemony and “good sense” within the journalistic field.

Only a few years ago a normative turn away from objective reporting in Norwegian climate change journalism took place. Journalists begun to ask themselves whether it was their job to rescue the planet. In this article, several dimensions of the ideal of objectivity are explored among Norwegian climate change journalists: balance, reflecting public opinion, truthfulness and neutrality. The truth-seeking ideal is illustrated by the conflict between political and natural realism in climate change politics: How large do cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases need to be? The author defends a critical realist ideal of objectivity, which does not have to be in contradiction with agenda-driven journalism.