The politics of politicization: Climate change debates in Canadian print media

Abstract

Politicization is frequently employed as an analytic concept to explain the relationships between politics and media coverage of climate change. However, relatively few works explore how different notions of politicization are mobilized by actors in media discourses themselves. This article does so via a framing analysis of climate change coverage in Canadian newspapers. I investigate how different relationships between science and politics are conceived and associated with varying positions on climate change. In particular, I examine a supposition in science and technology studies that the media remains committed to deficit models and thus uncritically reproduces the authority of science. Scientistic discourses exist but among a diversity of politicization framings. A key finding is that the strongest appeals to scientific neutrality are associated with climate skepticism. This casts light on the nuanced, strategic “politics of politicization” in climate change debates. A more fine-grained and reflexive approach to politicization discourses can help identify productive interventions.

1. Introduction

The politicization of science is a long-standing concern in a wide range of scholarships. Most generally, politicization describes a process by which politics affects science (Brown, 2015). However, what exactly these processes look like—and their normative implications—is conceptualized in diverse ways, pointing to different aims and scopes of analysis. This article explores notions of the politicization of science on climate change via an analysis of its coverage in three Canadian newspapers.

Canada has the third highest CO₂ emissions per capita among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (Crippa et al., 2019); it has been scrutinized due to its large oil industry (Tollefson, 2013); the effects of climate change are happening rapidly in some of its territories, turning them into contested sites of climate geopolitics (Gerhardt et al., 2010; Smith, 2010); and as the G8 country with the smallest population, Canada arguably has a disproportionate influence on the global stage (Chapnick, 2014). While Canadian coverage featured in early media analyses of climate change, it has received declining attention in recent years, during which the dynamics of climate change politics have shifted substantially (Schäfer and Schlichting, 2014). These factors make Canadian media coverage an apt case to examine the politicization of climate change.

While many kinds of science have been described as politicized, climate science has received particular attention due to its perceived high degree of politicization (Boykoff, 2011). Here, the media plays a critical role in enabling various actors to articulate and contest particular framings of climate change, especially regarding policy preferences, political interests, and broader normative concerns (Bolsen et al., 2019; Chinn et al., 2020). It has thus been fundamental in defining climate change as a set of public political issues.

Actor and analyst perspectives

As a heuristic, this article uses a classic actor/analyst distinction to map out different notions of politicization. In the fields of public understanding of science (PUS), science communication, and science and technology studies (STS), politicization is predominantly used as an analyst concept to make sense of the relationships between climate change, scientists, the media, and politics. “Politicization” is thus often a shorthand description of how political interests shape media representations of climate science and, in turn, its influence on policy-making (e.g., Antilla, 2010; McCright and Dunlap, 2011).

In contrast, this article starts from an observation that media actors frequently employ their own notions of politicization in discussions of climate change to frame their or others’ claims about climate science and policy-making processes. Few works have explored these kinds of discourses.

A primary task of this article is to understand in more detail how politicization is conceived of in these newspapers and how such conceptions relate to particular concerns and positions expressed about climate change. How are the relationships and distinctions between politics and climate science conveyed in these media discourses? What norms—both political and scientific—are articulated vis-à-vis climate change? Is there a discernible association between different political and scientific norms and stances on climate change?

I identify six main registers for framing politicization in Canadian media: politics corrupts science; politics disrespects science; politics needs science; politics supports science; science is separate from politics; and science is political. A key finding here is that traditional conceptions of politicization grounded in a strict normative separation of science and politics are most prevalent in discourses expressing climate skepticism, complicating the view that skeptical stances entail a rejection of scientific norms or an open embrace of politicized science (Fischer, 2020; Gross, 2017; McIntyre, 2018).

These findings reveal that actor and analyst overlap and diverge and thus suggest the need for more nuanced empirical descriptions of politicization. Different framings show that politicization is an active category open to contestation and boundary work (Zehr, 2000). From an analyst perspective, how might one understand the ways these politicization discourses are themselves politicized?

Here I pay particular attention to how different analyst conceptions of politicization align with different research programs in PUS, science communication, and STS. These connections reveal a larger set of normative commitments and tensions. Climate change is here again an apposite case: as an urgent technoscientific issue, it has compelled analysts to confront their own politics.

2. The politicization of climate change in/by the media

Politicization as transgression

A predominant meaning of politicization is an ideological distortion of scientific facts. In a popular book on American science policy, Chris Mooney (2006) defines it as the process by which “scientific information becomes merely something to be manipulated to achieve a political end” (p. 11). Similarly, in the academic literature, Briggle (2009) points to a “delegitimation” of science by which norms are “eroded by inappropriate partisanship” (p. 314). Concerning climate change in particular, Bolsen et al. (2019) define politicization as the process by which “an actor such as an elected official or interest group accentuates the inherent uncertainty of scientific evidence to cast doubt on the existence of a consensus” (p. 150).

Robert Brulle (2013) finds that a “climate change counter-movement” has actively shaped media discourses in order to undermine scientific research supporting the anthropogenic theory of climate change, so as to stifle both social and regulatory action (see also Boussalis and Coan, 2016). Such discourses are often categorized as climate change skepticism, contrarianism, or denialism (though the meaning and aptness of each term are debated) (Boykoff, 2011: 161–163). Here, politicization is seen as a cause of media misrepresentation, and reciprocally, misrepresentation is a means of politicization (Oreskes and Conway, 2010; Roper et al., 2016).

In this regard, studies have shown that climate change media discourses have a range of ideological connotations (e.g., Antilla, 2010; Carvalho, 2007; Dirikx and Gelders, 2010; Elsasser and Dunlap, 2013). Such analyses are often shaped by traditional concerns with media bias and look at how or whether the broader editorial stance of a media source maps onto climate change coverage (Painter and Ashe, 2012).

Politicization as an ordinary process of science

STS and related research show that science is bound to politics in numerous ways that do not necessarily entail transgressions of scientific norms. When politics narrowly refers to overt governance processes, politicization occurs when scientific claims come under the purview of politicians and policy-makers (Devitt and O’Neill, 2017). For others, politicization occurs when expert knowledge claims enter a larger arena of public and political discourse and contestation, creating linkages to other social, environmental, and economic concerns (Jasanoff, 1987; Latour, 2004b). The media plays a key role in these processes by framing climate change as a public issue, bringing diverse actors in contact with each other, and giving space to a wide range of claims-makers (Matthews, 2017; Trumbo, 1996).

A key issue is when and how politicization occurs. Latour (2004a) suggests that the very notion of a politicizing process is problematic since it depends on a conception of “pure” or “apolitical” science that becomes politicized (p. 253). On the micro-level, insofar as politics involves interests, negotiations, authority, and allies, the production of scientific knowledge is political from the beginning (Collins and Evans, 2007; Latour, 1987). With a macro-view, Jasanoff (2005) argues that what counts as science in a given setting is always already bound to, and co-produced with, institutionalized political understandings of the rightful place of science in society. In these senses, there can be no “unpoliticized” science.

One of STS’ characteristic moves in problematizing the relationships between science and politics is to allow for more expansive conceptions of both (Brown, 2015; Latour, 1987: 140). However, this article’s approach to politicization—by distinguishing between actor and analyst concepts—illustrates the challenge of trying to leave definitions open: politics is not a specialized term that resides with a narrow group of actors. The actor/analyst distinction can only ever be heuristic; the analyst must also reflect on their own definition. My working definition of politics runs closely to that proposed by Mike Hulme (2009): “when we articulate, dispute, and negotiate the ways in which we wish to live together in society” (p. 282). However, defined so broadly, the notion that there is no unpoliticized science can quickly become tautologous. The crucial work of STS has been to illustrate the concrete (and often unexpected) ways that science is politicized: not just when, but who, what, where, how, and why we articulate, dispute, and negotiate (Latour, 2004a).

The “why,” especially, means that politics cannot remain an impartial analyst category. While many scholars recognize that science is “unavoidably politicized” and that there is no such thing as “pure facts” about climate, they also argue that many media representations of climate change are deliberate attempts at obfuscation in order to serve specific political interests (Boykoff, 2007: 479; Carvalho, 2007: 239; DiFrancesco and Young, 2011; Olausson, 2009). Thus, analysts point to different kinds of politicization that can be at play simultaneously and demarcate some as problematic and undesirable (Fuller, 2007; Ylönen et al., 2017). In doing so, the analyst enacts their own politics.

Politicization as an actor concept

While less prevalent than analyst conceptions of politicization, several studies examine how media actors enunciate ideas about the relationships between science and politics in climate change coverage.

Drawing on earlier work by Zehr (2000), Asayama and Ishii (2014) look at how a science versus politics distinction was articulated in Japanese newspaper coverage of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Similarly, Ramírez-i-Ollé (2015) examines scientists’ media commentaries in the wake of the so-called “Climategate” controversy and considers how they try to (re)establish boundaries between science and politics in response to accusations of “political bias.”

Others look at specific rhetoric (Besel, 2011). Herrick and Jamieson (2001) look at how uses of the term “junk science” functions as a pejorative shorthand for politicized science. McKnight (2010) explores how skeptical positions about anthropogenic climate change in American, British, and Australian news media were explicitly framed as a response to “political correctness.” Mercer (2018) shows how classic demarcation criteria from the philosophy of science—in particular, Popperian falsification—enter public debates about climate change via the media.

Additionally, various research explores how boundary work is done by and through the media around issues other than climate change (e.g., cloning: Alcíbar, 2008; GM crops: Salleh, 2008; virology: van Rijswoud, 2010).

There are two key takeaways from this assortment of studies: first, they employ diverse approaches that are not necessarily in conversation with each other, thereby illustrating that politicization as an actor concept is under-conceptualized; and second, in all of these studies, it is found that the boundaries being discursively drawn around science map on to the prevailing pejorative sense of politicization as transgression. A key aim of this article is to explore to what extent this actor notion of politicization persists.

Alternatively, while not looking at politicization as an explicit actor concept, much work in STS examines the contingent reflexive understanding that actors—including “lay public” actors—have of the relationships between science and politics. Through such understandings, actors often become politically involved and challenge technocratic notions of expertise, citizenship, and governance (Beck, 2012; Hess, 2014; Wynne, 2003).

These diverse actor and analyst notions of politicization reveal that science can become differently politicized by various acts of representation, claims-making, network building, boundary work, and the exercise of power and authority, among others (Grundmann, 2011). Thus, one can understand politicization as both a matter of degree and kind, shaped by different normative concerns and political cultures.

The politics of analysts

While many analyses of climate science in the media avoid simplistic notions of objectivity and recognize science’s political value-ladenness, most accept the consensus view on anthropogenic climate change as an area where there is “clear understanding” among experts (Boykoff, 2007: 489). This understanding provides a standard for normative assessments of misrepresentation—and politicization, which are then often tied to activist climate politics (Bolsen et al., 2019; Oreskes and Conway, 2010). While adopting constructivist insights, such analyses do not entirely displace deficit models and might recognize them as necessary in some form.

Other studies take on greater degrees of impartiality toward climate science and focus on the construction of larger issue framings. As Gwendolyn Blue (2016) argues, “Framing climate change as an inherently science-based public issue not only shields institutional power from scrutiny, but it can also foster an instrumental approach to public deliberation” (p. 67). Brian Wynne argues that, through “uncritical repetition” of such framings, the media effectively reinforces an “entrenched institutional culture of scientism” (Wynne, 2014: 65). This relates to a long-standing concern that, in general, empirically robust, reflexive, and critical social scientific accounts of technoscientific issues are lacking in the media (Edmond and Mercer, 1999; Nelkin, 1987; Trench, 2008).

For example, Ryghaug and Skjølsvold (2010) argued the so-called “Climategate” controversy illustrated “the need to provide more realistic representations of how scientists work than those that seems to underpin news media’s interpretation of the e-mails” (p. 288). Dear and Jasanoff (2010) argued that, to STS scholars, the controversy was an instance of the well-documented “human dynamics” of science, but many media commentators were “appalled” by the events since they “ran sufficiently counter to the still-dominant Mertonian understanding (or ideology) of science as a detached, disinterested activity” (p. 773).

Many of these media critiques reflect a disposition of STS toward a critique of scientism (Brown, 2015). While there are various definitions of scientism, a common meaning is a strong societal deference, if not reverence, for the authority of scientific knowledge (Dornan, 1989). Collins and Evans (2007) demarcate degrees of scientism. The most pronounced takes science as the central organizing framework for society: not only should science be given an exalted status and receive special support, but social issues should be defined and addressed as scientific problems. This entails the view that science provides a privileged epistemology that can be extended into all domains (Lynch, 2004).

Collins and Evans’ (2007) “Third Wave” is in marked contrast to Wynne’s approach to the PUS, but they too include the media and its “narrow bandwidth” as contributing to a simplistic picture of technical decision-making and the public’s tendency to align along the given lines of a controversy (p. 21). Crucially, they argue that the rejection of mainstream scientific views does not typically mean a greater sensitivity to uncertainty, but a form of contrarianism that is just as scientistic in its commitments to alternative expert knowledge claims. They suggest that science coverage should provide more complex images of science.

Steve Fuller (2007) also talks of a “critical deficit” of the media (p. 129). He points to science journalism that conflates traditional norms in science with accounts of how science actually works. This, in turn, can uncritically reinforce the authority of (a particular political alignment) of science. Most blatantly, science journalism can become a debunking project, seeking out minority views and accusing them of politicization or ideological bias. Fuller criticizes the dearth of sociological accounts of science in the media and points to a classic asymmetry: science journalism perpetuates a traditional distinction whereby good science is distinguished from bad precisely by being apolitical.

A catch here is that this very distinction—which STS programmatically rejects—is then seen as a marker of scientism. Scientism thus defines a crucial normative analyst/actor tension. How can actor conceptions of politicization be described robustly? If some form of scientism defines these conceptions, in what sense and to what extent? These questions prompt a reflection at the analyst level: is there really a “critical deficit” in/of the media regarding politicization discourses? What are the implications of the notion of politicization as normatively mobilized in STS?

3. Methods

Timeframe and sources

I conducted a framing analysis on a sample of climate change articles from 2006 to 2019 in the three most widely circulated English-language broadsheets in Canada: the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, and the National Post. These newspapers are often categorized on a traditional left-right political spectrum (Hackett and Uzelman, 2003). The Toronto Star has a reputation as a progressive news source. The Globe and Mail is typically seen as a centrist paper in a Canadian political context—left-leaning on social issues but more conservative about economic issues. The National Post is defined by the prominent conservative stance of its editorial board and columnists. Their juxtaposition can provide a sense of predominant climate change discourses in Canada and allows for an examination of “political parallelism,” the notion that media coverage of climate change will correlate with existing political alignments (Schmid-Petri et al., 2017). It should be noted that major French newspapers are also published in Canada, based in Quebec. An inter-language and inter-cultural comparative analysis would be valuable; however, it is beyond this article’s empirical and analytical scope.

The timeframe encompasses several formative “critical discourse moments”: agenda-setting events that open up the discursive construction of an issue and expose different political commitments (Carvalho, 2007). These include the lead-up to and publishing of the IPCC’s Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports and major climate change conferences, including Copenhagen and Paris. In Canada, it encompasses the shift from a Conservative to a Liberal federal government and several major Canadian climate change policy developments, including Canada’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Accord.

Sampling

Since a predominant meaning of politicization supposes a fundamental distinction between science and politics (e.g., Asayama and Ishii, 2014), to analyze politicization framings, these newspapers were searched via the Factiva database for (“climate change” OR “global warming”) AND “science” (and related terms: “scientific,” “scientifically,” “scientist”; the term “political science/scientist” was excluded). To focus only on articles where climate change was a central topic of an article, only articles that met the following criteria were included: “climate,” “global warming,” “emissions,” or “greenhouse gases/GHG,” in the title, subtitle, or first paragraph, or had “carbon” in the title. This yielded 1165, 1134, and 949 total articles for the Globe, Post, and Star, respectively. Letters to the editor were excluded.

An initial systematic sample for establishing coding protocols for politicization categories was taken. Articles were ordered chronologically, a random number generator was used to define the first article, and then every fourth article was selected. The same process was used to establish a final sample of 275, 255, and 212 articles from the Globe, Post, and Star, respectively (after further removing duplicates, letters, or mishits of search terms), to which the coding protocols were applied to arrive at quantitative distributions of categories.

A second sampling process was used for a more basic deductive analysis that evaluated the frequency of scientific and politics/policy framings. The newspapers were searched for “climate change” OR “global warming.” For the Globe and Mail, the National Post, and the Toronto Star, 15,177, 8812, and 11,466 total articles were generated, respectively. A systematic sample was taken (taking every 35th, 24th, and 31st article in chronological order, starting from a random first article) which yielded 429, 354, and 371 articles, respectively.

Framing analysis

An underlying goal of framing analyses is to understand how the media promotes certain understandings, perspectives, and values by highlighting particular facets of events, favoring certain discourses, and constructing particular arguments, at the relative exclusion of others (Entman, 1993). Framings are established through diverse elements, including topic categorization and specific discursive formulations and rhetoric (Carvalho and Burgess, 2005; Takahashi, 2011; Trumbo, 1996).

Framings can be defined as the organizing ideas about a particular issue (i.e., how it is to be interpreted via social, ethical, or political concepts) or the dominant topics of an article (i.e., what the article is about—the economy, the environment, policy and politics, etc.) (Newman and Nisbet, 2015). Here I consider both: the former I define as politicization framings, and the latter as scientific and politics/policy framings.

Crucially, media stories are framed not only discursively but also systemically (Boykoff, 2007). The repetition of different intra-article framing techniques leads to discernible trends indicating the relative importance placed on different issue framings (Dirikx and Gelders, 2010). Here I attend to both through a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis.

Given the prevalence of the notion of politicization as a transgression in the literature, this was taken as a provisional deductive category to establish politicization framings. Articles in the coding sample were first categorized according to whether politics was presented as having a negative (or positive) effect on science. This categorization was then inductively and iteratively refined by identifying, at the level of the individual article, how the relationships and boundaries between science and politics were conveyed. Each article was annotated to identify reoccurring topics, terms, and phrases. These were amalgamated to establish coding instructions. A reliability test of the coding instructions was conducted according to guidelines proposed by Krippendorff (2011), which yielded an α of .963 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.924, 0.991). The result was a set of six generalizable, non-exclusive politicization framings (each article can exhibit more than one framing; some articles do not exhibit any such framing). The “Results” section defines and explicates examples of each framing. These categorizations were then used to code the final sample and measured in aggregate in order to provide a sense of the relative frequency of different politicization framings (final coding was conducted by a single coder, but reliability tests employed a second, independent coder).

The analysis of scientific and politics/policy framings employed a deductive categorization derived from Trumbo (1996). Scientific framings characterized coverage that was defined by scientists as claims-makers and which predominantly presents scientific research concerning the causes and effects of climate change (e.g., reporting on a new study in a scientific journal or a scientific report produced by an established scientific body). Politics/policy framings were defined as coverage that predominantly features politicians, policy-makers, legislators, and/or activists and claims made in familiar and explicitly identified political and policy contexts such as election campaigns, parliamentary debates, protests or demonstrations, and enactment of climate change legislation or regulations. These categories were mutually exclusive (i.e., a condition for being counted as a scientific framing was that scientific research was not presented in connection to a political or policy context; however, some articles exhibit neither framing; thus, totals of both framings do not amount to 100% of articles). A reliability test of the coding instructions was conducted which yielded a Krippendorff’s α of .974 (95% CI: 0.920, 1.000).

4. Results

Politicization framings

A set of six major politicization framings emerged from the analysis. The relative frequency of the framings in each newspaper is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Politicization framings.

Politics corrupts science

The most prevalent framing of science vis-à-vis politics in all three newspapers is that politics transgresses science in some way. However, what exactly constitutes the transgression varies—especially between newspapers—and thus, a range of sub-framings emerge. The most common of these is politics corrupts science. In the wake of the so-called “Climategate” scandal, columnist Rex Murphy argued in the Globe and Mail,

If the hard science of global warming . . . is to be the factual and scientific fulcrum on which policies for the world’s energy are to be decided, then . . . that such science must be absolutely untainted, [not] infused with the activist spirit . . .. It is really impossible to read some of those e-mails and not to take . . . that the necessary neutrality and disinterest of true scientific enterprise—the essential virtues of science—have been severely disobliged. . . . Has the authority and prestige of scientific practice been invoked at the very moment when its methods—its practice—has been . . . corrupted or degraded? This would be a reasonable question . . . even if the project or subject was one of far less consequence and scope than the planet’s climate and its economic practice. (Murphy, 2006)

In the Toronto Star, Dave McMillan writes,

There must always be political and scientific debate on [climate change] and other issues that have become rooted as much in passion as rational observation. The key, however, is to ensure the debate is based on the latter . . .. A common ploy of skeptics is to circumvent this process to avoid real debate with the worldwide scientific community. We must always be vigilant about reports that do not find their way through peer review, and ask if the writers have political or financial motivation. (McMillan, 2007)

This framing is ambivalent: it can be leveraged to support conflicting knowledge claims and policy prescriptions. These examples already display a “political parallelism”: in the Star, this framing underlies familiar critiques of climate skeptics as motivated by ulterior interests. The Globe and Mail is more equivocal: this framing tends to be associated with “skeptical” stances. In the National Post, a politics corrupts science framing is nearly exclusively attached to arguments undermining the mainstream view on anthropogenic climate change. Here they also appear the most vociferously and frequently (see Figure 1). In a representative piece, columnist Terence Corcoran makes an explicit appeal to an idealized conception of science:

More often than not, the consensus of the time—dictated by religion, prejudice, mysticism and wild speculation, false premises—was wrong. The role of science, from Galileo to Newton and through the centuries, has been to debunk the consensus and move us forward. But now science has been stripped of its basis in experiment, knowledge, reason and the scientific method and made subject to the consensus created by politics and bureaucrats. (Corcoran, 2006)

Politics disrespects science

While the politics corrupts science framing is centered on the norms and practices governing scientific knowledge production, another framing conveys a normatively problematic relationship between politics and science that does not necessarily bring scientific knowledge into question. Rather, it points to a transgression that happens external to science which is otherwise held to be sound. Politics is thus conveyed as something that causes undue respect or regard for science.

This framing is frequently linked to critiques of inaction on climate change. In the Toronto Star, columnist Thomas Walkom argues,

[Stephen] Harper routinely lauds Canada’s Arctic while ignoring the fact that its melting ice cap is putting the entire region at risk. Climate change simply isn’t important to this government. It calculates, perhaps correctly, that the voters don’t care. (Walkom, 2015)

Thus, politicization involves shutting valid science out of policy discussions. Here there is also ambivalence. Joe Oliver in the National Post states,

Dissenting views must be seriously considered, however, if opponents [to exporting Canadian oil] are NIMBYs or ideologues who ignore science, the national interest should prevail. Science, economics, national security and common sense all support opening our energy markets to the world. (Oliver, 2016)

While ignoring science can be passive, this form of politicization can also be a more active process. A common motif in the Toronto Star was that the Conservative governments led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper from 2006–2015 “muzzled” government scientists. Omer Aziz argues,

The story might end with the government’s inaction, but it does not. Instead, obfuscation and censorship are added for good measure. Ninety per cent of government scientists feel that they are not allowed to speak to the media about their research; almost as many fear retaliation if they do. . . . If the brilliant government scientists working on this issue are muzzled, the public has little access to the very people it should be hearing from. (Aziz, 2015)

The idea that science is being “silenced” also appears in the Post, but from a contrasting position:

Major surveys show that scientists in the tens of thousands do not believe that global warming represents a threat. With the departure of president Obama and his administration . . . whistleblowers in greater numbers will now dare to come forward, knowing they will no longer be silenced. (Solomon, 2017)

Politics needs science

While these politicization discourses posit various boundaries, they also define allowable or even necessary contact points. Discourses about disregarding or silencing science are frequently paired with another predominant framing: politics needs science. Concerns about the silencing of scientists emerge not only because of certain ideals of transparency but also because the allegedly suppressed knowledge is thought necessary for good governance. An editorial in the Toronto Star argues:

Canadians need to hear from alternative, science-based voices as well as from the well-heeled energy industry, as our policy-makers search for the optimal mix of resource development and environmental protection. The Harper Tories may have little taste for a spirited debate, but no one should be cowed into silence. (The Toronto Star, 2014)

The view that politics should be science-based also appears in the National Post, but supports a contrary policy position:

Countries blessed with vast natural resources profit enormously when they have the common sense and resolve to develop them. . . . It does not have to mean sacrificing safety or environmental protection. To the contrary, governments should rely on independent regulatory recommendations based on science and economics. But it does imply abandoning unsound policies grounded in ideology or failed political promises. (Oliver, 2017b)

Here again, there are matters of degree: sometimes, science is supposed to give clear guidance on specific policy measures; other times, it provides a basis for political action. In the Toronto Star, contributor Mark Lutes writes,

Is the science of climate change strong enough to provide a foundation for action and, if yes, what is the best path to a strong global regime? The answer to the first question, from any objective perspective, has to be an unequivocal, yes. (Lutes, 2006)

In the Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente offers further degrees of qualification. While science is necessary for policy, it can only inform and not dictate politics:

Science can, and must, inform policy decisions. But science by itself can’t tell us what to do. What to do is a matter of great (and understandable) dispute, and making policy to deal with climate change is fraught with all kinds of real-world complications. (Wente, 2007)

Politics supports science

This shows that different politicization framings are frequently complementary. Where politics is thought to hinder science, the proposed solution is typically not to eliminate politics altogether, but rather to constitute a different form of politics.

In the Toronto Star, Alana Westwood and Kathleen Walsh of Evidence for Democracy argue,

Canadians [had] had it with a decade of muzzled scientists, reduced research funding and big decisions in energy, health, crime and environment that lacked a clear basis in evidence. While campaigning, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals . . . issu[ed] sweeping promises to support scientists and research. To entrench a culture of scientific integrity, where communication and data are open, and research free from political interference . . . will require a chief science officer with arm’s-length independence, and science integrity policies enshrined throughout government. (Westwood and Walsh, 2016)

While these discourses are most prevalently associated with what could be called “activist” positions (in that they urge climate change action), as in the other cases, there is again ambivalence. In the National Post, former Conservative Member of Parliament Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver writes:

We urgently need transparent, independent and objective research and a free and informed debate, without any threat of retaliation to careers and reputations. It won’t start in Canada. The Trump administration, on the other hand, seems intent on it. Alarmists are appalled at that prospect but . . . there is too much at stake to allow intimidation and group pressure to stifle open inquiry. (Oliver J, 2017a)

In sum, such discourses convey that for science to effectively and positively bear on politics, politics must support science via funding, research initiatives, institutions, and perhaps most conspicuously, the vocal support of government actors.

Science is separate from politics

This politicization framing sits uneasily with another common theme: that science and politics are (or should be kept) separate. The examples above show that this frequently underlies a politics corrupts science framing. Here, science is epistemologically distinct from politics; political thinking is inappropriate for scientific questions. This restriction often goes both ways in that political questions are also outside the bounds of science:

[Former minister of environment and climate change Catherine] McKenna claims that decisions under C-69 will be “based on science,” but . . . whether a pipeline or a dam should be approved is not a scientific question. . . . Environmental assessment processes contain policy choices made on the fly and no amount of scientific information can change them into purely factual inquiries. (Pardy, 2018)

Here one can distinguish between different degrees of complementarity and separation. In the Westwood and Walsh piece above, science must be separated from certain kinds of political influence, and thus given independence, if it is to be politically relevant at all. This, in turn, demands certain kinds of political commitments to science.

Science is political

The converse motif also appears: scientists have a political responsibility. This emerges from frequent coverage of open letters or petition campaigns to pressure governments into implementing climate policies (Freedman A, 2019; Issawi H, 2019; The Toronto Star, 2008, 2015).

In the Globe and Mail, Anne McIlroy observes that both “skeptical” and “activist” scientists in Canada engaged in such campaigns. Both groups justified their actions in terms of the urgency of the problem and the sense that certain scientific viewpoints were being downplayed: “The dueling missives are a sign of how political the scientific debate over global warming has become” (Mcilroy, 2007). In this sense, politicization occurs when scientific claims-makers themselves enter the political arena.

Finally, one finds, though rare, what could be considered constructivist views on the relationship between science and politics. In a particularly salient piece in the National Post, Ronald Doering writes in a guest column:

Science, policy and politics are inextricably intertwined. What is surprising is how much our public discourse is still dominated by the quaint utopian view that science and policy can be strictly separated. Studies of scientific advising leave in tatters the notion that it is possible, in practice, to restrict the advisory practice to technical issues or that the subjective values of scientists are irrelevant to decision making. This is especially true in public policy issues such as climate change where much of the science is complex and uncertain. (Doering, 2010)

These media discourses can be interpreted as yielding a science is political framing. It distinguishes those discourses that construe science not as merely closely adjacent to politics, but where science (and scientists) is defined in terms of typical political qualities. This framing is also distinct from those that portray politicized science as inherently corrupt: in these cases, science cannot be political, in that politicized science is no longer “objective” or “sound” science.

Scientific and politics/policy framings

The above politicization framings emerge from discourses that relatively explicitly juxtapose science and politics. What about more implicit connections? What might constitute a “non-politicized” framing? What about coverage where climate change is represented primarily, if not solely, in “scientific” terms?

A straightforward scientific framing is uncommon, emerging in only approximately 3%–6% of articles sampled (Figure 2). Conversely, politics/policy framings appear in 48%–56% of articles. When looking at total coverage, peaks in reporting correspond to major political events such as the election of Barack Obama in 2008, Donald Trump in 2016, or various climate change conferences or G8/G20 meetings (Boykoff et al., 2023).

Figure 2.

Politics/policy versus scientific framings.

Other research finds this pattern: Trumbo (1996) shows that early climate change coverage in US newspapers was framed predominantly as a “scientific” issue—defined by scientist claims-makers in terms of causal mechanisms. However, by the late 1990s, politicians and policy-makers had become the dominant spokespeople, and coverage was increasingly framed in terms of value judgments and political action. Carvalho and Burgess (2005) and Weingart et al. (2000) find similar trends in the British and German press, respectively.

In this sense, these media framings suggest another analytical view of politicization: a process by which narrowly contextualized scientific research reporting becomes less prominent as broader concerns—expressed through an expanding set of actors and claims-makers—occupy more discursive space. Media coverage provides a way of tracing the transition of climate change from a “matter of fact” to a “matter of concern” (Latour, 2004a).

5. Discussion: opening-up or obfuscating climate change debates?

While the modest number of studies that have considered politicization as an actor concept have all emphasized a transgressive notion of politicization, here defined as a politics corrupts science framing, there is a greater range of conceptions of the relationships between science and politics at play in these discourses. Furthermore, the frequency of scientific and policy/politics framings shows that straightforward scientific reporting is marginal. This undermines the notion that the media typically construes climate change as an “inherently science-based public issue” (Blue, 2016: 67). These findings complicate the question of the media’s role in promoting scientism.

These newspapers provide many examples of nuanced, reflexive understandings of the relationships between science and politics. These reflect an opening-up of climate change deliberations to questions of uncertainty, the institutional power of science, the politics of scientists, and scientific knowledge-making practices themselves. The science is political framing illustrates that these questions do not need to imply a transgression. In this regard, coverage of climate change in these newspapers appears to have mitigated the “critical deficit” of science journalism to a certain degree (Fuller, 2007). Arguably, publicly engaged STS has long called for this kind of broadening of deliberation and issue framings (Jasanoff, 2003; Stirling, 2008; Wynne, 2003).

On the contrary, while the dearth of scientific framings might point to an opening up of discourses, many studies of climate change in the media have raised concerns about the minimal straightforward coverage that climate science receives and the prevalence of framings emphasizing debate (McCright and Dunlap, 2011: 359; Oreskes and Conway, 2010). As the various examples above show, climate change can be framed as a contested issue without contextualizing how specific points of debate might be weighed regarding relevance or importance for science or policy. Such an effect can come about incidentally, for example, through the norm of journalistic balance (Boykoff, 2007); others, however, have pointed to deliberate attempts to obfuscate climate change debates (Boussalis and Coan, 2016; Brulle, 2013).

Does this mean that the ostensible opening up of these climate change discourses to more diverse framings suggests that the tools of STS have been misappropriated, as long feared (Collins et al., 2017; Latour, 2004b)? There are several key points against this view.

Despite a range of politicization framings, a politics corrupts science framing remains the most prevalent across all three newspapers. Here a form of political parallelism holds. Despite sharing a notion of politicization, its application is polarized: it is leveled from both “activist” and “skeptic” positions, but to accuse others of transgression. However, this ambivalence is not balanced. The National Post, with its overt skeptical and contrarian stances, is the most vociferous in its accusations of politicization and the most explicit in its calls for traditional demarcation criteria separating science from politics. This is the case on both the intra-article and aggregate level; a science is separate framing is also more prevalent in the Post.

Thus, here there is a seemingly contradictory relationship: the discourses that seemingly “open up” deliberation over climate science also rely most heavily on images of science that STS has worked to dispel. A cause of much hand-wringing in STS over the past few years has been the field’s imagined role in ushering in a so-called “post-truth” world (Sismondo, 2017). Insofar as post-truth has meant a flippant disregard for scientific knowledge (represented by things like climate change “denial”), the findings of this study should assuage such anxieties (see also Mercer, 2018). Rather than embracing a science is political framing as a committed “post-truther” would (Fuller, 2016), the most vehement defenders of science from ideological contamination in these newspapers are those who are highly dubious, if not outright dismissive, of mainstream climate science. Climate change skepticism is here associated with scientism, not constructivism.

6. Conclusion

These findings shed light on how concerns about the misrepresentation of science can be reconciled with symmetrical constructivist approaches (Pearce et al., 2015). While this article has not evaluated climate change reporting in these newspapers for their agreement with the consensus view on anthropogenic climate change, a large amount of science communication and PUS research argues that overt climate “skepticism” relies on and perpetuates deliberate misinformation (Boussalis and Coan, 2016; Brulle, 2013; Elsasser and Dunlap, 2013; Oreskes and Conway, 2010). Such concerns are frequently critiqued for reinforcing deficit models, which can further perpetuate scientism (Wynne, 2014). However, the case of the National Post suggests that misrepresentation of science and scientism can be a simultaneous problem.

Indeed, scientism in the media is also a question of (mis)representation. STS critiques of scientism imply their own imagined public deficits (Durant, 2008). Here there is a shared concept of politicization among science communication, PUS, and STS analysts: the media politicizes through its representative power (Carvalho and Burgess, 2005). The ongoing dilemma is how to demarcate legitimate representations of disagreement and debate about sociotechnical issues while accounting for the tendency for interested media actors to overemphasize or conflate different kinds of consensus and disagreement (Boykoff, 2011). Recognizing this shared challenge provides an avenue for moving past long-standing tensions since promoting representations of climate change that faithfully capture the complexities of climate science and dispel scientistic notions of politicization should be a joint endeavor.

Doing so would mean moving beyond the “asymmetrical” conceptions of politicization that Fuller (2007) argues marks the “critical deficit” of science journalism (p. 129). However, when contemplating what STS can offer media representations of science, it is also important to recognize that the media, contra Fuller (2007, 2016), could and should not adopt a fully symmetrical stance to science (Lynch, 2020: 51). It should play a key role in disseminating research findings, and thus embrace, to a qualified extent, a scientific epistemology.

However, if not fully symmetrically constructivist, journalists and other commentators could further develop their “interactional expertise” (Collins and Evans, 2007) with more complex conceptions of politicization. In turn, they might recognize themselves as political actors, shifting the weight of discourses away from polarized accusations of political corruption to more reflexive engagement with how values shape different approaches to climate change—including expectations of what science should and can offer.

More modest media discourses about climate science might then emerge, which recognize both the limits and strengths of expertise. Such discourses would help mitigate both the overly enthusiastic views found in these newspapers that climate policy can straightforwardly flow from “settled science” and the misguided—and impossible—expectation that climate science must proceed from a state of apolitical purity.

Keeping the aggregate in view is crucial: these newspapers exhibit varied conceptions of the relationships between science and politics, bound to different normative concerns. In the balance between these different politicization framings, one can identify the potential for intermediation. If work in STS posits the media as complicit in propagating problematic framings of sociotechnical issues, a general lesson from this study is that such research needs to be grounded in more detailed accounts of media discourses that take notions of politicization as an object of analysis. The resulting analyses would allow one to make more purposeful interventions and identify where and how STS might productively reflect its own varied conceptions of politicization in media representations of climate change, and science in general.

Here STS can offer a reflexive sense of politicization. Expressions of politicization are in themselves a means of politicizing in that, among other things, they are a form of boundary-work. What makes this reflexive sense particularly constructive here is that it bridges the actor/analyst distinction—to intervene and undermine others’ conceptions of the relationship between science and politics is to (re)politicize. It is here, in reflecting on one’s own politics of science, that one might strike that elusive balance between faithful science communication and constructivist conceptions of science.

Author biography

Bernhard Isopp is a lecturer in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society, at the Technical University of Munich, where he teaches in the RESET (Responsibility in Science, Engineering, and Technology) Master’s Program. His research and teaching interests include science communication, environmental politics, mobility, and STS theory.