Climate Change Journalism: From Agony to Agonistic Debate

Starting from a politicized outlook on climate head total joy 2023 change, this essay criticizes mainstream journalistic norms for failing to enable an agonistic, democratic debate about how to move forward.Based on a targeted search for examples from the reporting (and reflection thereof) of two Dutch-speaking alternative news sites (DeWereldMorgen and De Correspondent), we seek to illustrate how their respective (climate) journalists look for saxemodel truth, generate democratic debate and hold power accountable by combining practices from constructive journalism, slow journalism and advocacy journalism.We find these journalists to focus on patterns, root causes and underlying values, rather than on novelty or exceptional events.Furthermore, an impartial and detached style of reporting is explicitly denounced in favor of an open and reflexive choice of news-making based on advocacy.