Advocates or observers? Slovenian newsworkers and climate change

Abstract

This paper analyses perceptions of the climate crisis by newsworkers of Slovenian (online) media and their news coverage of this topic. Through qualitative analysis of the in-depth interviews, the paper offers insights into the attitudes, perceptions, and motivations of selected Slovenian journalists and editors about climate change reporting and new insights into journalism practice and environmental journalism in Slovenia in terms of the peculiarities and contextual factors that can influence coverage of extreme weather events and climate change. The results show that the environmental and climate topics are underrepresented in Slovenian media, and these topics are covered in accordance with newsworthiness and public liking factors, and marketing neoliberal pressures to sell the news and make a profit. Such a commercialization and popularization of environmental journalism might lead to the passiveness of the audiences since it does not mobilize public awareness but rather represents the environmental topic as just another story in the media. The lack of analytical depth, critical problematization, wider contextualization of climate change, and the exaltation of journalistic norms of dramatization, eventization, noveltyization, and personalization prevent grasping the problem holistically.