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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.