How Accountability for Climate Change is Framed in Popular Magazines

In this content analysis of articles about climate change published in popular magazines over a two-year period (2020-2022), we examined both textual and visual content from climate change-related articles in National Geographic, Times Magazine and Discovery Magazine. Focusing on accountability and human-nature relationship, and informed by frame theory and agency theory, we identify 10 different accountable actor frames and three human-nature relationship frames. We found that texts indicate that government and industry are most often described as the accountable actors in climate change. Yet, our results from analyzing the accompanying images, based on an existing codebook of 118 codes, show present ordinary people in everyday lives more often than other accountable actors. Hence, there is a misalignment of text and images in accountability framing. In addition, we found that accompanying images focus primarily on the effects of climate change but less so on its causes, further complicating messages about accountability. We posit that more explicit and consistent communication about climate change accountability (causes and efforts to mitigate and prevent it) in magazine articles is needed to create accurate representations of agency and support social messaging around how audiences can work towards sustainability.