Economic-Industrial Versus Conservation-Climate Framing, Temporal Salience, and Lexical Valence in Energy Transition News Headlines Across Five Southeast Asian Country Files in the Babel Briefings Corpus (2020–2021)

Background: Energy transitions represent contested policy arenas balancing economic growth, energy security, low-carbon technology, conservation, and distributive justice across media streams. Objective: This study compares energy transition headline salience, frame composition, economic-versus-conservation lexical valence, temporal dynamics during the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), and actor–frame co-occurrence across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. Methods: Five country JSON streams from Babel Briefings v1 (8 August 2020 to 29 November 2021; 575,705,015 bytes; seed 20261022) were streamed via HTTP. Topic filters, six frames, and seven actor dictionaries were applied to English or translated headlines and validated against dual-coder annotation (n = 150; inter-coder κ = 0.864; dictionary-human κ = 0.812). Salience per 10,000 articles used 95% Wilson confidence intervals (CIs). Frame heterogeneity used chi-square and 3,000 permutations; Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (VADER) scores used Mann–Whitney U tests and Holm correction; October–November 2021 salience used HC3 Poisson regression. Results: Among 411,874 records, 409,678 eligible articles yielded 1,202 headlines across 210 outlets (strict filter: 1,125 [93.6%]). Salience ranged from 15.2 per 10,000 in Malaysia to 44.2 in Thailand. Frame composition differed across countries (χ2 = 185.6, df = 20, permutation p < 0.001, Cramér's V = 0.196). October–November 2021 showed doubled incidence (IRR = 2.05, 95% CI: 1.51–2.78, p < 0.001; strict IRR = 2.06). Economy-only (0.254; n = 458) and conservation-only (0.231; n = 140) valence did not differ globally (Δ = +0.024, p = 0.597, r_rb = 0.029; strict Δ = −0.059, p = 0.136) or after Holm correction. Explicit actors appeared in 217 headlines (18.1%). Conclusions: Southeast Asian media streams exhibit differentiated frame architectures and an observational COP26-period salience surge—distinguished from a direct causal effect—without valence divergence.