Visual Framing of Climate Change in Selected Newspapers in Kenya

Abstract

Raw information on issues such as climate change and the environment can be incomprehensible and meaningless to segments of media  the audience. To ease audience’s understanding of such information, the media may filter and (re)construct both the information  and the experiences that generated it; this is called framing. This study analysed how climate change is visually framed in selected print  media in a bid to understand how this could influence the audience’s understanding of climate change information. This study was guided by the Framing Theory. Data was collected from two newspapers in Kenya (The Standard and Daily Nation) published between  January 2013 and December 2017 which were purposively sampled due to their wide circulation and coverage. Qualitative content  analysis was used both as a methodology and a data collection tool and the data analysed thematically. The study findings indicated that  visuals were rarely used in the selected newspapers. From the findings, the depiction of actors was mainly based on their social class. The  most dominant visual frame was the politicians and talking head frame. A new frame that was depicted in this study was the humour  imagery frame. The causes of climate change are depicted as small causes and small solutions, but the impacts are depicted as  large scale which can lead to low self-efficacy amongst the citizens. This study concludes that visual framing of climate change is an area not fully embraced by the media in presenting climate change, yet it offers an array of opportunities to communicate the climate change  message.