The Greta effect: Visualising climate protest in UK media and the Getty images collections

Abstract

Media actors, broadly conceived, act as powerful agents shaping not only what we think about, but also how we think about it. Whilst research at the site of news content (e.g. newspaper articles) has proliferated, there is little understanding about the site of news production (i.e. the role that powerful actors play in shaping news content). Here, both news content (via newspaper articles) and news production (via image collections) are examined together to seek to understand how climate protest has been visually represented. This study focuses on the period between 2019 and 2020, a time of significant growth for climate protest through the expansion of movements including Extinction Rebellion and Fridays For Future. Historically, protest is often represented in the media through the ‘protest paradigm’, with protestors depicted as socially deviant. This study sought to examine if this paradigm held true for these most recent protests. Climate protest imagery was collected from a globally-dominant image collection, Getty Images; and from the digital archives of five major UK newspapers. Secondary analysis was also undertaken of a longitudinal visual media datasource featuring three of the same UK newspapers from 2001 to 2009. The study shows that in 2001–2009, climate protest was typically visualised in a way which obscured the human face of protest and was consistent with the protest paradigm. In contrast, in 2019–20, protesters – and particularly school strikers – were depicted in an individualised, powerful, and hopeful way. The dominant face of climate protest in 2019–20 is visually represented in the media as young and female. We conclude that the visual discourse of climate protest has shifted away from the protest paradigm to instead depict climate change as an issue of intergenerational equity.