How Do News Media Frame Society’s Future Problems? Investigating Distance and Scenarios in News Coverage About Climate Change and Aging Populations

Society faces several pressing challenges that demand sustained attention as they unfold. Key examples of such persistent social issues include climate change and aging populations, which are characterized by future-oriented, global considerations and uncertainties. Because of this distance, news media play a crucial role in making these issues relevant to audiences. This study illustrates how two existing concepts important for public understanding and engagement, psychological distance and pessimistic versus optimistic scenario framing, can be applied to explore how news media frame persistent social issues. Manual quantitative content analysis of 1,056 articles from Dutch newspapers (2003–2024) on climate change and aging populations identified three distinctive distance & scenario frames using cluster analysis: proximal doom framing (i.e. pessimistic, localized, immediate, and certain), distant doom framing (i.e. pessimistic, global, future-oriented, and uncertain), and uncertainty framing (i.e. uncertain, ambiguous outlooks). Furthermore, quality newspapers relied more on distant doom framing, whereas popular newspapers emphasized proximal doom framing. Framing patterns remained largely unchanged over time. Overall, the findings demonstrate how the concepts of distance and scenario framing can be meaningfully applied to news content and highlight challenges journalists face in balancing proximal reporting with broader, distant perspectives, and varied scenarios when covering persistent social issues.