Czech News Media Coverage of Climate Change: A Semantic Network Analysis

Even though Czech economy underwent a significant structural change after collapse of socialist centralized planning, it remains strongly industrial and manufacturing oriented. Heavy reliance on fossil fuels and persistent scepticism towards climate change in general population further underline the slow transition process towards decarbonized economy. Taking this into account, we argue that policies tackling climate change are shaped not only through political processes, but also by discursive practices. Thus, the research focuses on this wider discursive backdrop, within which diverse social actors struggle to promote their specific understanding of the contested issues. The most visible arena for such struggles is mass media space. The paper examines coverage of the climate change topic in major national newspapers, televisions, as well as online news websites in the Czech Republic from 1997 to 2016. Semantic network analysis is used to identify and explore dominant concepts and topics in the media climate change discourse and their temporal evolution. Standard descriptive and exploratory techniques such as community detection as well as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (topic modelling) are employed to reveal structural features of the semantic networks.