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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].

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...