Attention cycles and visual frames of climate change imagery in the Vietnamese national media

Research on visual media representation of climate change has largely examined Western nations and paid less attention to the national media landscape in the Global South. As a highly vulnerable country to climate change and an emerging economy, Vietnam offers a critical case for exploring how visual framing intersects with institutional, cultural and geographical contexts. This study examines longitudinal trends in visual portrayals of climate change and the strategic selection of imagery through framing by Vietnamese national media. First, a content analysis was conducted on images accompanying Vietnam News Agency’s articles on climate change from 2020 to 2023 ( N = 4284). Second, a frame analysis examined the connotative and ideological representations of the most prevalent visuals to generate hypotheses about the relationship between issue attention and particular frame dominance. It was found that Vietnamese visual coverage of climate change followed a cyclical attention cycle and contributed to the prominence of the ‘government, politics and negotiation’ frame. The finding suggests relative homogeneity with global climate change coverage, except for the latent meaning in frames related to climate impacts and affected people.