Media coverage of climate change and newsroom politics: The case of Montenegro

Abstract

Climate change is one of the most important global topics of public interest. Consequently, the role of the media is crucial to inform citizens about it and to raise public awareness. This paper is devoted to an analysis of the reporting methods of the most visited Montenegrin web portals regarding the topic. We al-so aim to determine how media workers and political agents cover this topic. Since 2007, Montenegro has been constitutionally represented as an ecological state, which has an excellent legislative framework but also numerous environ-mental problems. Bearing these facts in mind, we investigate this topic through the content and discourse analysis of 268 media texts on web portals in the period from October 21 to November 22, 2021 (UN Climate Change Glasgow Conference) and in-depth semi-structured interviews with seven important people covering this topic in Montenegro. We conclude that Montenegrin society is environmentally illiterate, although young people are more aware of the threat posed by climate change. The apathy of Montenegrin citizens can partly be attributed to the influence of media that superficially report on this issue and make no effort to educate the population or raise awareness about environmental protection and climate change.