WHEN DISASTERS SPEAK: HOW THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE WALL STREET JOURNAL FRAMED CLIMATE CHANGE IN EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS, 2000—2024

Abstract

Climate communication research has largely treated disaster coverage as event-specific and temporally bounded, obscuring how institutional ideology and hazard characteristics jointly shape the interpretive frameworks audiences use to understand climate risk. This thesis reconceptualizes climate disaster coverage as a temporally dynamic and hazard-contingent process in which news organizations' institutional alignment with distinct elite sourcing networks produces systematically different interpretations of the same physical events. Drawing on an integrated framework of framing and indexing theory, the study examined how elite newspapers construct divergent interpretations of climate-related extreme weather. The analysis is based on a corpus of 10,069 hard-news articles published in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal between 2000 and 2024, covering six hazard types: hurricanes, droughts, floods, wildfires, tropical storms, and heatwaves. A stratified sample of 604 articles was manually coded to establish intercoder reliability and to train a RoBERTa-based supervised classifier, which was then applied to the full dataset. Binary logistic regression models assessed outlet-level differences, hazard-specific variation, and temporal trends across five framing dimensions: causal attribution, responsibility attribution, political conflict, impact framing, and scientific uncertainty. The findings reveal systematic and widening divergence between the two newspapers, indicating that elite journalism does not converge toward shared climate narratives even as scientific consensus strengthens. The New York Times is significantly more likely to attribute extreme weather to anthropogenic climate change, assign responsibility to institutional actors, and emphasize social and health consequences, whereas The Wall Street Journal more frequently relies on natural variability explanations and naturalized responsibility frames. Contrary to expectations, political conflict framing is more prevalent in The New York Times, suggesting that in hard-news disaster reporting, political conflict reflects governance accountability debates rather than partisan ideological positioning, a distinction that simple left-right media comparisons obscure. Hazard type further moderates these patterns, with slow-onset disasters being more strongly linked to climate causation and rapid-onset disasters generating greater emphasis on immediate impacts. Anthropogenic attribution increases across both outlets over time, with a marked acceleration after the mid-2010s, while the gap between the two newspapers expands considerably, indicating deepening ideological differentiation rather than convergence. This study makes three contributions to communication and journalism research. Theoretically, it shows that framing and indexing theory work best as complementary rather than competing frameworks. Institutional orientation shapes which causal explanations are routinely available, while elite sourcing influences which explanations gain legitimacy. Together, these forces operate multiplicatively across outlet, hazard type, and historical period. Methodologically, the study applies and validates a supervised classification pipeline combining manual annotation with RoBERTa-based modeling across 10,069 articles, demonstrating both the potential and limits of scaling theoretically grounded framing constructs computationally. Empirically, the findings show that elite journalism does not simply communicate scientific understandings of climate change and extreme weather. Instead, the two newspapers present competing interpretations of causes, responsibility, and consequences. These differences widened after the mid-2010s as attribution science advanced and political polarization around climate change intensified.