COMUNICACIÓN Y REPRESENTACIONES DEL CAMBIO CLIMÁTICO: EL DISCURSO TELEVISIVO Y EL IMAGINARIO DE LOS JÓVENES ESPAÑOLES TESIS DOCTORAL-GTESO-UCM-

This research has been carried out in the field of applied sociology to the investigation of communications and the social representations. The topic of this investigation is the Climate Change (CC).Both public opinion surveys carried out by the European Commission (EC 2008 and 2009) and the CIS (Center of Sociological Investigations) in Spain, confirmed that the television is the main source of getting information regarding environment and CC for the population (with the exception of formal education). Recent research carried out in Spain confirmed this fact (Meira et al. 2009, 2011 and 2013). Previous research about the communication of CC agreed on the little relevance given by the television to the CC.A coverage led by the political agenda and the representation of the impacts. Youth will be responsable for facing them in different ways and they will have to develop strategies to adapt in order to live in a planet with a rising global temperature.The main objective of this investigation is made up of the representation of the CC in the television message, in the perception of youth, in the critic message of experts in relation with the CC and the communication of it, as well as the study of possible relationships among different representations. The main goal of this research is to analyze the different representations of the CC to identify the common elements, the missing elements, the differences and the errors represented with the final purpose of drawing conclusions and suggestions that allow the improvement of the audiovisual communication of CC, specially the communication focused on youth. In order to reach this specific goal, it was neccesary to reach seven previous partial objectives. These are the hypothesis:The CC appears represented in the news in Spain set by the political agenda, the presentation of research or scientific projects, natural catastrophes and weather changes.TV media gives little importance to CC. It appears mainly in daily news, outside the prime time and without a stable regularity in terms of TV content.The CC receives a superficial treatment and lack of contextualization due to standardized narrative formats which are typical of professional routines of the field.The editorial policy and the economic and business conditions of the sector, affect on how CC is treated on TV. Not only in the number of news broadcasted but also in the resources used to its elaboration and the sources that were checked.The CC is treated as a global phenomenon.The Journalism in Spain has dismissed the false “balance” on TV news about the CC.Youth, due to their level of education, are a range of population that are very well educated in CC (Meira et al., 2011), the age and the educational stage affects their perception of the phenomenon.Youth do not have a clear perception about where energy sources come from.Most youth believe in CC and in its non-natural origin caused by human activity. Their believe in CC does not match neither with their perception of risk nor with their personal implication to fight against the CC.The information shown on TV is not very clear on the causes and the consequences of the CC, especially about the social aspects of its impact.The news information about CC shows little solutions, and it focuses mainly on mitigation ways, not being very representative the adaptation.According to the European and national public opinion surveys, television is the main information source on CC for citizens, as well as for youth, that is why is it possible to find meaningful elements that match in both representations of the CC.In order to give answers to these hypothesis, four approaches have been developed with a specific methodology. The first approach consisted on asking several groups of experts which were selected based on their professional profile in relation with the management, investigation or communication of the CC. Their message has been obtained through three different technics: the conversations Phillips 66, the interviews and the questionnaire Delphi.The second approach was focused on the analysis of the coverage and the treatment given by the TV to this matter. Different theoretical points of view were applied, such as: framing, newsmaking and narrative perspective. The corpus of analyzed registers is made of all the programs broadcasted on television in Spain that talked about the CC in 2011 (195 registers). Paying attention to the hypothesis of the agenda setting, the period of coverage of the summit of Durban in 2011 was excluded. The third approach has been a study of the social representation of the CC perspective of youth, and it has been carried out using qualitative technics (discussion groups) and quantitative (online monitored surveys).The content of the spontaneous message on CC was analyzed and it was obtained from two discussion groups where the youth profiles were different in terms of age and educational level.751 complete surveys done by Spanish youths that had the same profile as the previous ones were also analyzed. They came from eight autonomous communities and four different climate regions (values “p” and “q” out of 30/70 and a 5%+ - error limit).The fourth approach has been the comparative analysis from the results obtained. The contrast has been done in relation with the variable that have been used in a cross way for the analysis of the different representations which come from the discourses analyzed (experts, TV, youth).The results confirmed all the hypothesis made, although clarifying some of them, and they even show a clear diagnosis about the characteristics of the media representation of the CC and also certain things to make an improvement. In this summary, the results that are shown are the ones more significant from the comparative analysis of the television message about the CC and the representation of the phenomenon in the perspective of youth. These results show more coincidences than differences between both representations.The main protagonists and informative sources on television are scientific experts and technicians followed by politicians. Activists and affected people were just supporting actors. Television represents almost evenly the impacts (40%) and the solutions (41%), leaving the references to the causes of the CC below (20%). The representation of the CC in the perspective of youth gets close to these results especially in the representation of the impacts of the CC, reaching 71,59% from the total of imaginary images described by the survey respondent.These images refer to the causes of the CC in a slightly high percentage compared to the television news, 22,53%. When talking about the representation of the solutions, both representations show a great distance between each other: solutions appear in a 5,88% of the imaginary images of the survey respondent and a 41% appear in television media. Half of survey respondents admitted not knowing the Kyoto Protocol. Youth consider that the solution is first of all global than local.The dominant framing of the CC as an environmental topic in the presentation of the television news focused on the impacts of different ecosystems, coincides with the content represented in the perception of youth, symbolized in a recurrent imaginary image: the melting of the polar ice caps, the destruction and the collapse of the environment. This representation of the imaginary images of the youth, have a great negativity charge. The catastrophes and natural disasters take an important place in both representations. The second most important framing in the representation of the news about the CC is social (21%), thanks to ecologist groups and civic association. The influence of the human dimensions of the impacts on the TV representation of the CC (the access to natural resources, including water and food and the risks to health) is below 10% of the analyzed news being far behind the importance of politics on TV representation. The social and human dimensions of the impacts hardly reach 1% of the perception of youth.Another significant coincidence between both representations is that the information about CC hardly connects with the economic model or consumer society. The causes have little importance in both representations in relation with the impacts and they are represented as contamination, without pointing the people responsible on the TV message. It is not provided a context for the global cause of the problem: the energetic model. Energy is absent to a great extent in both representations, as well as the scarce representation of the causes and the lack of knowledge on energy sources that survey respondent admit and show.Non sceptical positions were found on the TV message in contrast to talk shows, coinciding in some aspects with the scepticism shown by a young man in one of the discussion groups.The message on TV about the hole in the ozone layer in relation with the CC has been dismissed, however the answers to the survey show that this confusion is still connected to a great percentage of youth (65%).