Large Scale Narrative Messaging around Climate Change: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

Haiqi Zhou, David G Hobson, Derek Ruths, Andrew Piper

Keywords: climate, narrative, stories, news, framing, China, media

TL;DR: In this study, we explore the use of GPT-4 to extract and analyze the latent narrative messaging around values associated with climate change in a collection of 15,000 news articles from North American and Chinese media.

Abstract: In this study, we explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 to extract and analyze the latent narrative messaging in climate change-related news articles from North American and Chinese media. By defining "narrative messaging" as the intrinsic moral or lesson of a story, we apply our model to a dataset of approximately 15,000 news articles in English and Mandarin, categorized by climate-related topics and ideological groupings. Our findings reveal distinct differences in the narrative values emphasized by different cultural and ideological contexts, with North American sources often focusing on individualistic and crisis-driven themes, while Chinese sources emphasize developmental and cooperative narratives. This work demonstrates the potential of LLMs in understanding and influencing climate communication, offering new insights into the collective belief systems that shape public discourse on climate change across different cultures.

Archival Submission: arxival

Submission Number: 15