Journalists As Cosmopolitan Actors in Climate Change Communication? Exploring Taiwan Case

Climate change as globalized “risk” is one of the most pressing issues of our time. It has been revealed that the media plays a key role in shaping public perceptions and policy agendas. This paper derives from an approach relating “reflexivity” to public sphere within today’s globalized communication landscape, which allows to combine the framework of reflexive cosmopolitanism with “reflective interdependence” (Volker, 2014) in order to assess fine lined communication trajectories across digital networks. In other word, given the advanced stage of digital spheres nowadays, journalists are “connected” across world regions and are now situated in highly complex communication flows, ranging from traditional news agencies to thematic social media sites. Within such a digital “networked” context, in addition to constructing national “risk” perceptions, if journalists construct globalized “risk” perceptions as well? It is critical to explore on the “pattern” in which journalists perceive climate change and how they engage with “news” across such a globalized digital scope of sources? Employing in-depth interviews with mainstream journalists along with other social actors, such as scientists, media experts, and policy makers in the field of climate change research, this paper aims to identify the “reflexive” axes, constructed by journalists in Taiwan, and discover the way in which journalists in Taiwan assess different horizontal sphere to construct climate change within their professional context.