News reporting on arrests and trials of climate activists in the U.S., U.K., and Sweden

This paper examines how news media textually and visually represented the protests, arrests, and criminal trials of climate activists in the U.S., U.K., and Sweden during the early-2020s—a period of heightened anti-climate reactionary backlash in response to the progressive and transnational climate movement of the 2010s. This study’s cross-national, comparative, and multimodal critical discourse analysis reveals a privileging of police and prosecutors’ accounts as the primary—and oftentimes final— definers, with little room given to protesters to contest their criminalization. The analysis highlights differences between media and countries in addition to overarching patterns. Ultimately, this paper shows how major news outlets across all three countries gave primary voice to elite figures from the state’s legal apparatus to discredit protesters, but also, in the U.K. and Sweden, how these figures were occasionally qualified by scientific, political, and other experts in defense of activists—a trend strikingly absent from U.S. outlets.