Driven by climate change, extreme weather events are increasing worldwide. Through their reporting, news media can inform public understanding of this trend. However, it is not yet clear to what extent the media report on extreme weather events, how their reporting relates to actual weather conditions, and whether they address the connection to climate change in their coverage. We use automated content analysis to examine the coverage of heat, drought, and climate change in three major Swiss newspapers from 1998 to 2023 (n 5 43779). Our results show that issue attention for heat, drought, and climate change has increased significantly over time. Within coverage of heat and drought, the context of climate change is addressed considerably more often in recent years. We find a significant relationship between issue attention for heat and temperature data as well as for drought and precipitation data but only a partial correlation between issue attention for climate change and meteorological data. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: News media are essential for the public understanding of environmental issues, such as extreme weather events and climate change. In this study, we aim to better understand how frequently and under what conditions the media report on heat and drought and whether they link these extreme weather events to climate change. Swiss media attention to heat, drought, and climate change has significantly increased over the past 26 years. Since 2018, there has been a notable increase in reports mentioning heat and drought alongside climate change. Media coverage has grown beyond what could have been expected based on meteorological conditions alone. With the rising mentions of climate change in news coverage of extreme weather, qualitative research examining how news media explain this link could provide valuable insights into the accuracy and depth of these explanations.

How we perceive the public opinion climate can have important consequences on our own opinions and behaviors. Such perceptions are especially relevant during moments of widespread crisis, as they may influence support and compliance with crisis response measures. In this paper, we address what factors inform misperceptions of public opinion during these important moments. We focus on two complementary processes, internal and external crisis information processing, to explain variation in public opinion misperceptions of three measures during the COVID-19 pandemic (masking, use of a contact tracing app, and vaccination). Analyses of 82 weekly waves of longitudinal rolling cross-sectional surveys of the Swiss population during two years of the pandemic (N = 36,667) demonstrate that individuals regularly underestimated the popularity of these measures. We find that those who were in the opinion minority (usually those strongly opposed to these measures) had less accurate estimations of public opinion. News media played an important role for misperceptions. When it comes to the correction of misperceptions, individuals reporting to be regular news readers were more likely to have more accurate perceptions of public opinion. Combining the survey data with measures of media salience across news media published during this period, ARIMA time series modeling shows that the salience of measures in the media affects public opinion misperceptions for app usage and masking. Implications for the field of political communication are discussed both in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and for crises more generally.

Despite broad scientific support, vaccination is traditionally a contested issue among the public. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the issue of vaccination received widespread attention in news media and on social media. Although we know that public debates on such disputed issues evolve over time in hybrid media systems, there is still little knowledge about the extent to which news media and social media align or differ in their issue attention dynamics and semantics. Furthermore, empirical studies, particularly on social media data, tend to focus on periods of high issue attention, often missing relevant reference points before or after such phases. Focusing on the issue of vaccination in Switzerland, we examine 77,798 news articles by 20 Swiss online newspapers and 929,431 posts by 22,672 Swiss Twitter (now X) users to investigate the similarities and differences between the two spheres through a time series analysis between April 1, 2019, and June 30, 2022. The findings show how vaccination gained vastly in issue attention—measured as the share of total coverage and tweet volume, respectively—during the Covid-19 pandemic. Twitter and news media were closely aligned during the crisis in terms of issue attention and semantics, but less so before and after the pandemic. These findings substantiate previous works on issue agendas in hybrid media systems that converge toward a dominant issue in times of crisis.

Social norms have great potential for mitigating crisis as people align their prevention behavior with the norms they perceive. However, there is insufficient knowledge of how normative perceptions are formed to exploit this potential. Drawing from agenda-setting theory, the present study examined norm-setting processes of media reporting on perceptions of vaccination norms during the COVID-19 pandemic. It combined data of a continuous content analysis of the salience and valence of the vaccination issue and a weekly repeated cross-sectional survey on perceived descriptive (i.e. perceived prevalence of willingness to get vaccinated) and injunctive vaccination norms (i.e. perceived approval of getting vaccinated) in the Swiss population, from February 2021 to February 2022. Time-series-based regression modeling did not support the hypothesized first-level norm setting-the transfer from issue salience in media to perceived descriptive norms in the population. However, we found evidence for second-level norm setting: Changes in issue valence predicted changes in perceived injunctive norms in the Swiss population. The findings provide unique insights into norm-setting processes and highlight the relevance of monitoring media reporting and public perceptions as a basis for evidence-based crisis communication.

Issues continuously compete for attention in the news media and on social media. Climate change is one of the most urgent problems for society and (re)gained wide public attention in 2019 through the global climate strike protest movement. However, we hypothesize that the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 challenged the role of climate change as a routine issue. We use extensive news media and Twitter data to explore if and how the pandemic as a so-called killer issue has shifted public attention away from the issue of climate change in Switzerland. Results show that the climate debate fell victim to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the news media and the Twitter-sphere. Given the vast dominance of the pandemic, there is a strong indication this finding applies similarly to various other issues. Additional hashtag co-occurrence analysis shows that some climate activists react to this development and try to connect the issue of climate change to the pandemic. We argue that suppression of climate change by the pandemic is a problem for its long-term resolution, as it seems to have turned climate change back into a struggling issue.

Scholars from different theoretical schools have posited that in recent decades, science and society have moved closer together, and the concept of academic engagement has been proposed to capture one part of this approximation empirically. This study analyzes the academic engagement of individual scholars towards politicians, industry representatives and journalists. It uses comprehensive survey data on Swiss professors from all disciplines, all the country's universities and from associated research institutes. It assesses, firstly, the degree to which these professors have professional contacts to journalists, politicians and industry representatives. Secondly, it explains the extent of these contacts, using multi-level modelling that incorporates individual factors as well as organizational and institutional contexts. Our study shows that academic engagement is quite common with strong differences between disciplines. Furthermore, professors with higher academic productivity, positive personal attitude towards communication activities as well as a leadership position have more outside contacts. The gender and nationality of the professors, however, only play a role for some of the contacts with non-scientific actors.

Climate change-related perceptions and communication are important factors influencing people's support for climate change policies and individual behavior. Since research on both climate change-related perceptions and communication is biased towards Western countries and standardized research methodologies, this paper investigates perceptions across South African communities using a deductive-inductive qualitative approach. 20 individuals in three communities of a South African town were interviewed about their climate change-related perceptions and communication. Results show that for individual concepts of climate change, interviewees' perceptions differed across the communities: higher educated communities had more differentiated and diverse conceptions of causes and consequences of climate change and potential countermeasures. Most interviewees, across the communities, stressed that they considered climate change as an important problem, although other social problems seemed more pressing. Interestingly, all three communities most frequently encounter the issue of climate change through new and traditional mass media, but their self-assessed knowledge about it varies widely.