Agenda Setting of Climat Change News in Iranian Dailies

Media determine for public opinion or politicians that should think about what topics and the amount of importance of issues by using agenda-setting theory. There has been a lot of scientific researches on how to cover climate change news in different media in other countries, but in Iran as one of the top ten emitters of greenhouse gases that is also one of the world's most vulnerable countries to climate change due to its geographical location, such researches have rarely been done. This study is one of the first scientific researches that attempt to understand precisely how climate change news has highlighted in Iranian dailies.The theory of agenda-setting and quantitative content analysis has been used to achieve this goal, and fifteen well-known Iranian dailies reviewed from two weeks before to two weeks after holding the United Nations climate change conferences of Bonn 2017, Paris 2015, Copenhagen 2009 and Montreal 2005). Finally, have been gathered 3905 environmental articles that 388 articles were about climate change issues.The findings showed that the Iranian dailies had got a poor performance in highlighting climate change subjects. The news coverage of the conferences has decreased from Copenhagen to Bonn, indicating that as global warming and its consequences increased, the Iranian press's attention to the issue has diminished. As well as the political perspectives of dailies have been evaluated influential on how to highlight climate change news, and there were significant differences between them in the ways of covering climate change news too.