Who owns the transition narrative? BERTopic text mining of Polish press discourse on the energy transition (2015–2023)

This study uses the Multi-Level Perspective to map the coverage of energy-transition issues in the Polish press from 2015 to 2023. Specifically, we examine how coverage is distributed across landscape, regime, and niche levels and how these distributions and topic salience vary among business, liberal, and right-wing press titles. We compiled 3152 articles that mentioned “energy transition” and used a transformer-based BERTopic pipeline to identify 50 topics. At the landscape level, our study revealed that the Polish press emphasized European Union climate regulations, macroeconomic conditions, and geopolitics in its coverage. At the regime level, coverage focused on coal controversies, energy infrastructure, prices and affordability, environmental, social, governance, finance, renewables, and small modular reactors. Niche content put emphasis on hydrogen and alternative fuels and highlighted the impact of digitalization and automation. Additionally, we found that business outlets overrepresented finance and markets, framing sustainability in commercial terms while downplaying partisan conflict and broad environmental policy. Liberal outlets prioritized domestic politics and social debates over technical or market dimensions. Right-wing outlets emphasized climate and the environment within national frames, highlighting hydrogen and infrastructure tied to security and independence while downplaying financial-market perspectives.