Throughout the past decades, nuclear accidents have had a significant impact on the debate surrounding nuclear energy, causing public concern about the safety and reliability of utilising nuclear...Show moreThroughout the past decades, nuclear accidents have had a significant impact on the debate surrounding nuclear energy, causing public concern about the safety and reliability of utilising nuclear energy. In the last year, public concern has been fueled up again because of the Russian bombing and occupation of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine. This study seeks to investigate to what extent the media is framing nuclear energy, by especially looking at articles since the events at Zaporizhzhia. The media present various narratives regarding social concerns and debates, such as nuclear energy, and can affect public opinion by the selection of topics, frames and sources that the media uses. The main purpose of this research is to explore the presence of framing of nuclear energy in British and Irish mainstream newspapers. The study will focus on how nuclear energy is represented in news articles in a sample of mainstream news media outlets in both the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland. Fifteen articles from four different newspapers and with different political stances were collected and coded for analysis using a comparative content analysis and a risk-benefit coding scheme. The coding scheme was both based on an existing set of codes from previous research and existing theories, as well as newly generated codes. The results from this analysis demonstrated that British media tends to be overall supportive of nuclear energy, even after the events at Zaporizhzhia. In comparison, analysis revealed that the Irish media tends to be unsupportive and critical of nuclear energy and that Zaporizhzhia has negatively impacted the risk frames used by Irish media. Depending on the nation’s history with nuclear energy, and the government’s stance towards nuclear energy, the narrative of the newspapers were either positive or negative.Show less
