Mass-media representations of climate change move into the public sphere to fight for citizen attention alongside many pressing twenty-first century challenges. Through the framing of issues, predicaments and possibilities, a variety of ‘actors’ have undertaken variously embattled efforts to define the ‘climate question’. The quip from former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair indicates how this is a battlefield, where actors can be adversarial in working to fulfil their roles in this public arena.

In particular, media workers – journalists, publishers, editors – shape these narratives through the application of journalistic norms and values, within a larger landscape of political, economic, environmental and cultures pressures (Gamson et al., 1992). As such, selections from the steady stream of everyday events are captured as ‘climate stories’, thereby shaping public perception. Influences such as asymmetrical power and access to these discursive negotiations feed back through these social relationships and further shape emergent climate ‘news’, knowledge and discourse. In these ways, encoded messages – television/radio broadcasts, printed newspapers/magazines and internet communications – do not simply inform the public about the ‘right’ decision, but actually provide inputs into a dynamic and contested web of meaning-making and maintenance.