News Coverage of Climate Change in Nature News and ScienceNOW during 2007

Climate change has become one of the most favored topics in mass media, political discourses, and scientific discussions during the past decade. By the end of 2007 the scientific journals Science and Nature both demonstrated the urgency of climate change by emphasizing the importance and necessity of appreciating climate change, its severe consequences, and its anthropogenic causes. During that year the two journals' online news services Nature News and ScienceNOW framed climate change to fit particular agendas resulting in markedly different narratives. This article demonstrates that Nature News reported more critically on political decisions, scientific results, and social matters of climate change compared to ScienceNOW. Operating under different institutional constraints ScienceNOW generally took a more cautious line. The evidence drawn from both textual and visual analyses shows that news sections run by scientific journals are very similar to mass media in framing their coverage of science to fit specific agendas.