Climate Change Discourse. Remediation and Recontextualisation in News and Social Media

Numerous scholars have pointed out that citizens’ awareness, attitudes and actions towards climate change are shaped by mediated information (Bevitori, 2014; Boycoff and Boycoff, 2004, 2007; Carvalho and Burgess, 2005; Russo 2018). News media play an important role in the popularization of climate science and scientific evaluations of climate-related risk. In order to make risk decisions, citizens seek information, which is increasingly circulated through online news media, and later re-mediated in social media, such as facebook and twitter, or face-to-face conversations. Yet, when climate-change discourse is re-mediated, its recontextualisation redefines the meaning assigned to climate change terminology and discourse due to the influence of news values such as negativity, personalization, impact, superlativeness, novelty, and expectation (Bednarek 2006). This special issue provides a fresh perspective on the topic at issue by engaging with a broad range of case studies that will enhance and enrich our understanding of this complex process.