Climate change and attribution in Italian TV news coverage of the Emilia-Romagna flood: a missing story?

While extreme weather events may make climate change feel more immediate and personally relevant, this potential depends largely on how such events are framed in the media. This article examines how Italian prime-time television news covered the May 2023 floods in Emilia-Romagna, focusing on the salience of climate change, the framing of causal attribution, the visibility of political and scientific actors, and the presence of obstructionist narratives. Drawing on a mixed-methods content analysis informed by framing theory, the study analyzes 1,017 television news reports broadcast on Italy’s main channels in 2023. The findings show that climate change was rarely mentioned in coverage of the floods and even less frequently framed as a causal factor. Explicit discussions of causality were generally limited and, when present, were more likely to attribute responsibility to failures in land or emergency management than to climate change. Political actors dominated the coverage, whereas scientists appeared mainly in segments explicitly addressing climate change. A qualitative analysis of the 29 news items that identified climate change as a cause of the floods further reveals the presence of obstructionist frames that downplay systemic responsibility and discourage climate action. The study contributes to research on climate communication, climate and attribution framing, and climate delay discourse, while also providing new evidence from a media context that remains highly influential but has received relatively limited scholarly attention.