Visibility Without Feasibility: Media Discourse and Institutional Stabilization of Pesticide-Free Farming in a High-Regulation Context (Denmark, 2000–2025)

Denmark is internationally recognized for its stringent pesticide regulatory and monitoring regime, yet it remains unclear how sustained media attention has shaped the discursive feasibility of pesticide-free farming (PFF) as a scalable transition pathway. This study analyses the construction of PFF as a policy issue in Danish news media using 453 newspaper articles (2000–2025). Using a discursive-institutionalist framework, the analysis integrates quantitative text-analytic methods with qualitative contextual interpretation. The results show that media visibility does not translate into an expanded articulation of feasible transition pathways. Coverage is structured primarily around solution-oriented and regulatory debates, yet many solution narratives remain conditional and incremental, while health-related concerns, everyday farming practices, and livelihood dimensions remain marginal and weakly integrated. Government authorities, farming organizations, and industry actors occupy the communicative core of the discourse, whereas NGOs, consumers, and public health actors remain peripheral. Media attention peaks around regulatory debates but fails to generate cumulative discursive momentum toward integrated and scalable transition pathways. The study suggests that media narratives play a constitutive role in shaping the publicly articulated feasibility of pesticide-free agricultural transitions, highlighting the importance of plural, health-integrated, and practice-oriented media discourse.