“We're the Ones to Blame”: Citizens' Representations of Climate Change and the Role of the Media

In the discussion on how to meet the challenges of climate change the important role of news reporting is often emphasized; the media are considered to have significant influence on citizens' understandings of the issue. However, studies that empirically explore the media's role in shaping these understandings are rather scarce compared with analyses of media content alone. While fully acknowledging the fruitfulness of the study of media material, this article argues that there are tendencies in these studies to, in a somewhat "media-centric" fashion, reduce the complexity of the relationship between media content and audience reception. The article, which reports on findings from a focus-group study containing 53 Swedish citizens, starts from the premise that this relationship must be subjected to empirical analysis rather than axiomatically asserted, and aims to contribute empirically based knowledge on the connection between media staging of climate change and citizens' representations of this global risk.