Learning from climate change news: Is the world on the same page?

models. These are explicitly favored over more complex features and architectures that could improve performance, but are hard to interpret, such as word embeddings and neural networks. Three research questions are answered: 1. Are there major topical and terminological differences between the articles on climate change by newspapers from different countries? 2. Are there major topical and terminological differences between the articles on climate change by newspapers with different political orientations? 3. Are there major topical and terminological differences between the newspaper articles on cli- mate change during different COP meetings? It is hypothesized that differences can be found between newspaper articles from different countries, particularly between countries from different continents [15, 16]. A larger contrast is expected to be seen between right and left-oriented newspapers, considering the issue seems to become ever more politicized [11]. Lastly, it is expected that differences exist between COP meetings as well, especially between editions that are further apart [14, 17]. Previous work Numerous studies have stressed the importance of mass media in communicating the con- cerns associated with climate change [15, 18–25]. Furthermore, news media can influence pub- lic concern about climate change by increasing levels of attention to it. Journalists, as Hase et al. contend [26], can present climate change as a more ubiquitous topic in the news by (a) stressing the sociological dimension of climate change and illustrating how humans are aware

of, affected by, combating, or causing climate change [27], (b) focusing on how climate change affects public health [9] or (c) on activities that people can take [28], thereby encouraging pub- lic participation. Climate change coverage can be distinguished by both domestic and global viewpoints on what causes it, who is affected by it, and how it can be addressed [29]. Several studies have been conducted to determine whether media coverage differs around the globe [30, 31]. According to [32], finding cross-national commonalities in the way climate change is reported is key because the existence of these commonalities may suggest the emergence of a public sphere as “an enduring structure that enables political debate and opinion formation for and with a global audience” (p. 689). However, research generally finds that discrepancies in cli- mate change coverage persist [33]. These variations could be brought on by global factors that affect news media coverage, such as the political or economic contexts of various nations [34]. For instance, different national responsibilities for addressing climate change, politics, or vul- nerabilities may have an impact on how much attention is paid to and how much is covered by the media [17]. According to an overview by Schmidt et al. [17], the majority of studies on climate change news focused on single countries, and only a few assessed differences between newspapers across nations. Also, among the studies assessing single and cross-country newspapers, manual

content analysis seems to be the preferred method. As for the automated analysis of climate change-related news media, most of the relatively slim research on the topic relied on auto- mated content analysis techniques [16, 17], while very little used machine learning [11, 14, 35]. Thus, the state of the art of the literature seems to indicate both the necessity to expand the cross-country analysis of climate change-related news media and the need to do so by explor- ing the use of machine learning techniques. PLOS ONE Learning from climate change news PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0297644 March 20, 2024 3 / 27