arXiv · 2601.10142
Actors, Frames and Arguments: A Multi-Decade Computational Analysis of Climate Discourse in Financial News using Large Language Models
Abstract
Financial news media shapes trillion-dollar climate investment decisions, yet discourse in this elite domain remains underexplored. We analyze two decades of climate-related articles (2000-2023) from Dow Jones Newswire using an Actor-Frame-Argument (AFA) pipeline that extracts who speaks, how issues are framed, and which arguments are deployed. We validate extractions against 2,000 human-annotated articles using a Decompositional Verification Framework that evaluates completeness, faithfulness, coherence, and relevance. Our longitudinal analysis uncovers a structural transformation: pre-2015 coverage emphasized risk and regulatory burden; post-Paris Agreement, discourse shifted toward economic opportunity and innovation, with financial institutions becoming dominant voices. Methodologically, we provide a replicable paradigm for longitudinal media analysis with LLMs; substantively, we reveal how financial elites have internalized and reframed the climate crisis across two decades.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Ruiran Su, Janet B. Pierrehumbert, Markus Leippold. 2026-01-15. Actors, Frames and Arguments: A Multi-Decade Computational Analysis of Climate Discourse in Financial News using Large Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10142
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.