This paper suggests some further avenues of empirical and theoretical investigation for media research on climate change. “Old” suggestions, whose significance, as we see it, needs to be further reinforced, are included, as are “new” ones, which we hope will generate innovative research questions. In order to integrate the analysis with knowledge generated by media research at large, we revisit four research challenges that media scholars have long grappled with in the investigation of journalism: (1) the discursive challenge, i.e. the production, content and reception of media discourse; (2) the interdisciplinary challenge, i.e. how media research might engage in productive collaboration with other disciplines; (3) the international challenge, i.e. how to achieve a more diverse and complex understanding of news reporting globally; and (4) the practical challenge, i.e. how to reduce the theory–practice divide in media research.

This article is based on the assumption that nature inevitably plays a role in urban placemaking. Today, cities worldwide are engaged in place promotion in which nature is constructed as a commodity to consume. This article explores the enrollment of nature in tourist information with a specific analytical focus on the relationship between nature and culture. Guided by framing theory and citing the case of tourist information in Stockholm, the article empirically demonstrates how nature is enrolled in tourist information and turned into a commodity through three distinct but related frames that, in various ways, construct nature as ‘‘other’’: nature as the familiar other, nature as the exotic other, and pristine nature. The article concludes that the enrollment of nature in city marketing reproduces the modern nature-culture divide, which enables the commodification of nature and helps conceal the environmental consequences of increased urban density.

Within the field of global media studies, there is an ongoing conflict between the globalists, who emphasize the media’s pertinent role in globalization processes, and the skeptics, who stress the continuing stability of the nation-state paradigm as regards the media. Nonetheless, these two positions share one fundamental view on global media: that the proper objects of study are those media whose global nature is defined in terms of geographic reach. In the discourse perspective theorized in this article, however, “globality” is instead viewed as a discursive feature. It is argued that the established understanding of global media as media of transnational reach needs to be complemented with a discourse approach―focusing on the very knowledge production of “the global.”

This paper focuses on the role of the news media in the (re)definition of contested environmental issues. It analyzes how the media, by means of various discursive strategies, legitimize or de-legitimize different claims about how to handle environmental issues. Guided by critical discourse analysis, the paper analyzes the news reporting on two cases of insect outbreaks in Sweden: one which resulted in spraying and one which did not. The analysis concludes that the production of hegemonic meaning on contested environmental issues – i.e.  the process by which certain definitions of how to understand and manage them emerge victorious from the discursive struggle between stakeholders – is closely linked to journalistic routines, as well as to media logic in general and to the media’s difficulties in handling scientific uncertainty in particular.

This paper aims to outline a renewed research agenda for media studies on climate change. This field is rather young, and so far, researchers have primarily tended to analyse media content and –although to a much lesser extent –citizens’ representations of climate change in relation to media discourse. Thus, the field is still in the phase of mapping out media representations of climate change from various perspectives (scientific, democratic, political, visual, emotional, etc.). Admittedly, this is an essential task for obtaining basic knowledge on climate reporting and its implications, but the timely question now is how media research on climate change might theoretically and empirically evolve, and move into the next phase. In this paper, we identify four important research challenges which we believe should be considered by scholars in the field: 1) the practical challenge, 2) the normative challenge, 3) the discursive challenge, and 4) the interdisciplinary challenge