Success or Failure? News Framing of the COP26 Glasgow Summit and its Effects on Citizens’ Beliefs About Climate Change

Abstract

The UN climate summits represent decisive moments for climate change policy. Under significant media coverage, world leaders gather for intense negotiations over policies to address global warming. Given the enormous political, economic, and environmental issues at stake, news media typically frame these summits in terms of success or failure. Still, we know surprisingly little about how these mediated mega events influence public perceptions both during and beyond the specific summit. Focusing on the 2021 Glasgow summit (COP26), this study combines a media content analysis and a two-wave panel survey with a rolling cross-section component, to determine how news framing influenced both summit-specific and more generic climate change beliefs among citizens in Sweden. Findings show (1) that beliefs about the success/failure of the summit took shape immediately following the summit, (2) that news framing effects were particularly pronounced when the final agreement was settled, and (3) that these instantaneous framing effects on summit-specific beliefs left small but lasting imprints on citizens’ generic climate change beliefs several weeks after the summit. These findings have implications for both climate opinion and theories of dynamic news framing effects.