Malaysian media coverage on climate change: a qualitative analysis of Malaysian online news between 2016 and 2020

Climate change is a change in weather patterns caused primarily by greenhouse gas emissions. The topic of climate change and its effects has been discussed frequently in a variety of media because it is a global issue that has been debated for decades but is frequently given a back seat. The public's perception of and behaviour related to climate change is significantly influenced by the news media. However, only a few studies were conducted on media portrayal of climate change in Malaysia. Thus, a content analysis was conducted to investigate the media’s perception of climate change in Malaysia over five years, analysing the difference in climate change coverage in various online newspaper sources and identifying the focus of media coverage on climate change in Malaysia. The data for this study involves news articles published from January 2016 to December 2020 using online newspaper archives. In addition to the high proportion of environment-related articles across all the news sources, the findings show that climate change coverage has increased gradually over the past five years. However, the results also focused on climate change coverage in Malaysia and its differences between the newspaper outlets. Therefore, this study can help to improve media representations of climate change and can heighten the relationships between and within the fields of science, policy, media, and civil society to mitigate the impact of climate change in Malaysia.