Framing the Climate Crisis in European Media: A Comparative Study of Five Major News Outlets

This study examines how five major national news outlets in EU member states framed climate change between 2022 and 2025, a period shaped by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, implementation of the European Green Deal, and growing political contestation over the pace of the green transition. Drawing on Entman’s framing theory, comparative media-systems research, and critical discourse analysis (CDA), it analyses a purposive corpus of 112 articles from Der Spiegel, Le Monde, La Repubblica, Gazeta Wyborcza, and El País. Each article was assigned one primary frame and, where applicable, one secondary frame. Across the corpus, national sovereignty was the most frequent primary frame (39 of 112 articles), although patterns varied substantially by outlet: Gazeta Wyborcza was distinctive for its emphasis on just transition, while El País was the only outlet in which scientific urgency was the leading primary frame. The article introduces the Energy Security Bridge-Delay Framework, which distinguishes energy-security discourse that accelerates decarbonisation (Bridge), temporarily accommodates fossil-fuel use within a defined transition pathway (Transitional), or justifies indefinite postponement (Delay). A 21-article CDA sub-sample examines these categories in greater depth. The findings indicate that energy-security discourse is not inherently supportive of or hostile to climate transition; its implications depend on how responsibility, costs, technologies, and transition timelines are framed.