Who’s behind the News? The Role of News Agency LETA in Framing of Climate Change in Latvian Media

Description

Mass media play an important role in creating frames and narratives for understanding of reality. They create their own agenda on climate change interacting with policy agendas and public concerns. But there is a context of developing impact of PR on the news industry and journalistic elaboration of topics. It is especially important to understand how media deal with complex global system problems like climate change, The global perspective must be connected to the local one, and the local problems and issues must be enacted in the global context.  The proposed paper is aimed on analysis of connections between narratives and frames proposed in press releases and articles of the news agency LETA and those in the publications of the most popular Latvian media.. The methods used for analysis of frames of narratives is narrative analysis and content analysis. The materials were selected for the analysis using the list of climate change related key words and it was completed by the tool 'station.lv. The reference period is  November, 2021 to April, 2022.. The preliminary results show that in the time period analysed news agency LETA with both releases and news articles is the leader of using climate change related keywords, i.e. speaking about climate change. At the same time the narratives and frames created by the journalists of LETA and PR specialists working with releases are transferred to the news materials of other, especially, on-line media (group of media with highest audience reach for climate change issues).. Due to the specifics of the dynamics in the newsroom ecology, LETA has a big impact on climate change narrative formation in Latvia.The research for the paper was founded by FLPP project Nr.lzp-2020/1-0047 'From indifference to making difference in climate policy: improving the interaction between political narrative and societal perceptions in Latvia'.

Period	29 Mar 2023
Event title	RSU Research week 2023: PLACES
Event type	Conference
Conference number	3
Organiser	Rīga Stradiņš University
Location	Rīga, LatviaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International