Politics triumphs: a topic modeling approach of analyzing news media coverage of climate change in Pakistan

Abstract

News media is one of the main sources of information for many people around the world on climate change. It does not only increase awareness among the public but also have the potential to sensitize people toward climate change impacts. Till date, few studies focus on media coverage of climate change in the low-income countries such as Pakistan which is among the top ten countries impacted by global warming. This study used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling and analyzed 7,655 climate change-related news articles published between 2010 and 2021 in three Pakistani English newspapers. Our results suggest that climate change coverage in Pakistan has substantially increased over the years, however, the focus has generally been on "climate politics'', "climate governance and policy'', and "climate change and society''. Evolution of different themes and its potential implications on people are discussed.