How people make sense of climate issues in the news

This paper asks how people make sense of climate issues in the news. As part of a study in Norway, with repeated interviews and open-ended questionnaires, we invited people to share their thoughts on three real and recent news stories. The examples were related to climate change on local, national and global scales, with varying levels of conflict and different narrative frameworks and visual components. We find that news articles with different characteristics invited three modes of sense-making: inconclusive reasoning, moral stance-taking, and reiterating climate discourse. Our study contributes to untangle central questions about how journalism with various forms of anchoring might mitigate low engagement with climate news. Methodologically, the study provides innovation in the form of a qualitative study with real news examples. In concluding, we discuss why the most important aspects of climate change make the least sense as news.