A multifaceted issue: The coverage and politicization of the climate change issue on Italian television

Abstract

This article investigates the level and nature of politicization of the climate change coverage in a selection of programmes aired by the main Italian national TV channels, and aims to establish connections between this analysis and public opinion research (also in view of a possible future harmonization of the research tools). Cli- mate change is a multifaceted issue, as it is the assessment of its politicization. This complex nature becomes even more evident when trying to assess whether (and how) its politicization operates at the public opinion and at the media content levels. As to the contents, we observe that the climate change implications are portrayed and framed considering a variety of domains including economic, environmentalist, equality, conservationist, tech- nological, etc. Both media coverage and public opinion research tend to swing from high to low concern, and from high to low politicization. The main RQ can be summarized as follows: 1) Is there a growing coverage of climate change issues?; 2) Is there a growing politicization of climate change issues?; 3) Does the level of polit- icization vary during the 2022 electoral campaign?]; 4) Does the politicization also mirror/reflect conflicting perspectives on climate change issues advocated by political actors holding conflicting stances? We will address our research questions using a novel, hand-coded, dataset of TV news, covering the 2020-2023 period. Data will consider TV coverage both in “ordinary” and “emergency” periods (such as the Emilia Romagna floods in spring 2023), with special attention to the contents voiced by political actors on Television during both ordinary periods and the national 2022 electoral campaign.