Front-Page Environmental News Coverage and Implications for the Public Sphere: A Study Against the Backdrop of India’s G20 Presidency

Abstract

This study examines front-page environmental news coverage in two prominent national newspapers against the backdrop of India’s G20 presidency. The study integrates agenda setting and framing theories with public sphere theory, to understand the implications of front-page coverage of environmental issues for the public sphere. Following a mixed methodology, content analysis and frame analysis were conducted on a continuous six-month sample of the two newspapers, covering 180 days and 360 issues. A total of 435 front-page environmental stories were identified and analyzed. The findings reveal that front-page environmental reporting in the sampled newspapers spotlighted the severe environmental crises impacting the country, rather than the government’s sustainability-oriented and eco-centric discourse during the G20 presidency. Weather emerged as the most salient topic, followed by pollution. Foregrounding extreme weather and unusual weather patterns on the front page helped problematize weather events as a public concern. However, the disproportionate dominance of weather and pollution, along with an overreliance on routine sources, poor representation of source categories such as scientists/experts, and underutilization of data journalism reveal limitations in inclusive and rational deliberation on environmental issues. Problem-centric framing dominated the coverage, followed by adversarial narratives. Framing also overwhelmingly emphasized environment-related risks to humans while risks to nonhuman entities were marginalized, indicating anthropocentric tendencies in environmental coverage.

1. Introduction

The year 2023 holds significance for India in the context of sustainable development. Apart from surpassing China as the most populous country in the world, India was in the global spotlight for hosting the high-profile Group of 20 (G20) intergovernmental summit. A founding member of the G20 since its establishment in 1999, India held the G20 presidency for the first time from 1 December 2022 to 30 November 2023. The event was notable for its strong thematic focus on environmental sustainability and an eco-centric developmental discourse, centering on “the value of all life” over a “human-centric approach” (Press Information Bureau, 2022). The official theme of the summit—One Earth. One Family. One Future. (Press Information Bureau, 2022)—was inspired by the Sanskrit phrase Vasudhaiva kutumbakam, a core concept of ancient Indian philosophy that loosely translates to ‘all world is one family’ (Mittal, 2012). LiFE (Lifestyle for Environment), a behavior-based movement initiated by the Government of India for a “cleaner, greener and bluer future”, was another prominent feature of the official narrative (MyGov, 2023). The event also served as a platform to spotlight the country’s Panchamrit roadmap for climate action, which includes achieving 50% energy requirements via renewable energy by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2070, among other targets (MyGov, 2023). Overall, the G20 discourse reflected India’s attempt to construct a distinctive identity on the global stage, grounded in environmental commitments and an eco-centric worldview.

However, empirical evidence paints a contrasting picture of the state of sustainability in the country. Although India is a signatory to major international agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol, Paris Agreement, and Convention on Biological Diversity, studies suggest that its existing policies remain insufficient to meet these international obligations. Even as India strives to project its environmental and climate commitments at international forums such as the G20, it continues to face significant financial, technological, and governance-related constraints domestically in balancing economic growth with sustainable development (Begum & Mobin, 2025; Gupta et al., 2025). The country’s performance across key environmental indicators underscores the depth of this challenge. India is among the world’s most water-stressed countries (Igini, 2024), home to 83 of the world’s 100 most polluted cities (Cullinan, 2024), and the seventh most climate-vulnerable country (Mohanty & Wadhawan, 2021). It is also the world’s third-largest fossil carbon emitter (Tiseo, 2024) and among the five worst performers in biodiversity conservation, ranking 176 out of 180 countries in the Environment Performance Index (Bora & Kumar, 2025).

The government’s high-powered campaign on sustainability and climate action during the G20 presidency, thus, transpired amidst crippling environmental crises, providing a unique opportunity for the media to foreground environmental issues and activate the environmental public sphere (Cox & Pezzullo, 2015). The event provided a thematically rich and theoretically grounded temporal context to examine how the media negotiated the official sustainability discourse against these pressing environmental realities. This study explores this dynamic through the analysis of front-page environmental news coverage in two national-level English-language newspapers against the backdrop of India’s G20 presidency.

Recent studies have documented a general increase in environmental and climate coverage in the Indian media, using a range of methodologies including large-scale, automated topic modeling (Keller et al., 2020; Patel et al., 2022; Umamaheswaran et al., 2022), content and frame analysis (Boora & Karakunnel, 2023; Kumar & Nargunde, 2026), and systematic literature review (Dwivedy et al., 2023). While these studies broadly examine various print and digital media in general, Dixit et al. (2025) focus on environmental coverage on newspaper front pages and editorial pages, albeit within a limited one-month time frame.

The current study differentiates itself in three aspects. Firstly, the study applies a theoretical lens that integrates agenda setting and framing theories with public sphere theory. This framework affords a unique critique of environmental news coverage both as a product of media logic (Abalo & Olausson, 2023) and as a site of democratic discourse (Higgins, 2006; Garman, 2019). Public sphere theory also provides theoretical grounding to situate the study in the context of the G20 summit. Secondly, it specifically focuses on front-page coverage of environmental news, extending the traditional agenda-setting analysis to explore the visual, structural and editorial prioritization of the coverage (Baah-Acheamfour & Lamptey-George, 2025). And finally, the study utilizes a continuous six-month sample covering 180 days and 360 newspaper issues for comprehensive manual content and frame analysis. This approach is grounded in the premise that the media’s contribution to public discourse on a continuous, routine basis is particularly relevant for beats such as the environment where issues are not always event-driven but chronic and slow-developing (Boykoff, 2009; Gibson et al., 2015).

The next section examines the role of newspapers in reporting environmental issues in India, and the centrality of the front page as a critical site of deliberation in the public sphere.

1.1. Review of Literature

1.1.1. Environmental Reporting in Indian Newspapers

The Indian newspaper market is among the fastest-growing in the world. Even as newspapers in the West continue to experience decline in readership and circulation, the newspaper industry in India is forecast to grow at CAGR 3.2% to INR 33,053 crore by 2028 (Banerjee & Kumar, 2026). According to recent Audit Bureau of Circulation figures, daily newspaper circulation in India has demonstrated a resilient post-pandemic revival, recording a growth of 2.77 per cent between January and June in 2025 (Express News Service, 2025). Newspapers in India are also rapidly adapting to the changing media ecosystem, launching digital editions and consolidating their presence on social media to reach out to a wider audience (Biswas, 2024).

Although newspapers continue to thrive in India, environmental reporting remains marginalized due to peripheral and episodic coverage (Mishra, 2020). In the West, studies have investigated the impact of journalistic norms such as novelty, objectivity, and balance on environmental coverage, as well as issues related to scientific consensus, event-centric coverage, and news routines (Boykoff, 2009; Djerf-Pierre, 2012; Gibson et al., 2015). Environmental reporting in India, however, faces a different set of challenges, reinforcing arguments against the uncritical application of Western journalism models to other press systems (Boykoff & Rajan, 2007).

In her analysis of climate change coverage in the Indian print media, Mittal (2012) notes a complete lack of skepticism in news stories and unquestioned acceptance of anthropogenic causes of the climate crisis. This is corroborated by other studies (Painter & Ashe, 2012) that note that news coverage of skepticism is mostly limited to the USA and the UK. Keller et al. (2020) found that the Indian media’s coverage of environmental issues related to wildlife protection, forests, and water shortage is gaining prominence compared to climate change, possibly because the science of climate change is perceived as largely settled. Another persistent limitation in environmental coverage in India is the lack of scientific explanation and heavy reliance on government sources (Mittal, 2012; Poornananda, 2022). Corporatization of media in the post-liberalization era has further intensified economic and political pressures on journalists covering environmental issues (Poornananda, 2022).

That said, the Indian media have played a major role in foregrounding and contextualizing several environmental issues over the years. In fact, audiences in India get most of their information on climate change and environmental policies through newspapers and television (Dwivedy et al., 2023). Newspapers, particularly, have proven that they have the potential to create powerful narratives around the environment (Mittal, 2012). Events such as the Narmada dam protest, the Chipko movement to protect trees and the Navdanya eco-feminist movement for seed sovereignty were widely covered by both the regional and national press (Aram, 2012; Mittal, 2012).

Regional and English-language newspapers have served complementary roles in environmental communication in India. In their study comparing two English-language and two regional Tamil newspapers, Thirumalaiah and Aram (2017) found that English newspapers showed greater diversity and volume in environmental coverage, while Tamil newspapers slanted more towards political frames. Another study comparing The Times of India, the most widely read English-language newspaper in India, and Dainik Bhaskar, a leading Hindi newspaper, found that both newspapers showed considerable lack of prioritization in the coverage of climate change and sustainability issues compared to other topics, with Dainik Bhaskar having slightly more coverage and editorial initiative on these topics (Dixit et al., 2025). Notably, coverage of environmental issues in regional newspapers has been proven to increase public interest in them (Thirumalaiah & Aram, 2020).

However, studies evaluating the prioritization of environmental news on the front page remain scarce.

1.1.2. The Newspaper Front Page

The front page is considered one of the most coveted resources in a newspaper. As the most visible element of a publication (Bowd, 2017), it holds a particular material presence and is meticulously curated and designed by the editorial team. Readers are more likely to read stories on the front page than any other page, as it is a site of multimodal argumentation (Serafis & Tseronis, 2023). A highly contested political space, the front page provides a more direct lens on a newspaper’s editorial line than the editorials, which target a narrow category of critical readers (Costanza-Chock & Rey-Mazón, 2016).

Despite competition from digital platforms, newspaper front pages remain key spaces of communicative power that shape the general news agenda and, by extension, the public agenda (Costanza-Chock & Rey-Mazón, 2016). While digital platforms offer technological affordances such as algorithmic recommendations and other metrics to gauge and enhance audience engagement, recent studies on intermedia and networked agenda setting suggest that legacy news media continue to influence news construction and issue salience in today’s multi-platform news environment (Kim et al., 2024). Coche and Bell (2023) contend that prominent newspapers can externally transfer the salience of a story by featuring it on their front page. Editorial decisions about front-page story selection, thus, represent a crucial mechanism of agenda setting (Moon et al., 2024).

From a public sphere perspective, front pages represent important public spaces of intersection between audiences and the news producers, demonstrating their substantial power to shape public opinion (Moon et al., 2024). Front pages are curated to attract a diverse audience, leading them into a world of news and enhancing their capacity to intelligently engage in political life (Le, 2012). In the mediated public sphere, where prominence directly shapes public attention, front-page placement assumes heightened significance (Higgins, 2006). It signals that an issue ranks among the most important developments of the day, increasing its potential to influence public discourse and set the public agenda (Cristancho & Wouters, 2021).

1.2. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework of the study is informed by public sphere theory (Habermas, 1989), agenda setting theory (McCombs & Shaw, 1972), and framing theory (Entman, 1993).

Figure 1 illustrates how the three theories translate into empirical media practices that shape the environmental public sphere. It depicts an analytical model with public sphere theory at the apex providing the macro foundation of the study. The public sphere is conceptualized as a democratic space where rational–critical debates occur (Habermas, 1989). The model illustrates how the newspaper front page—the fundamental site of analysis for the study—is structurally situated within the public sphere, through a hierarchical layering of the mediated public sphere, dominant legacy media, and English-language newspapers.

This core structure branches out into two key analytical dimensions at the level of the dominant legacy media: agenda setting and news framing. The newspaper front page functions as the point of convergence where these two editorial mechanisms intersect with the third analytical dimension of inclusive and rational deliberation, derived from public sphere theory (indicated by the dashed line). The three analytical dimensions are operationalized via specific parameters described in parentheses. Together, the analysis of these parameters sheds light on the implications of mediated discourse for the environmental public sphere.

The next two sections elaborate on this framework by examining the role of English-language newspapers in India’s mediated public sphere, and the theoretical intersection between agenda setting, news framing, and the environmental public sphere.

1.2.1. Public Sphere and English-Language Newspapers in India

The public sphere is a critical component of democracy that helps ordinary citizens hold those in power accountable, enabling democracy as a system to legitimately claim to be the “rule of the people” (Higgins, 2006; Garman, 2019). Habermas (1989) conceptualizes the public sphere as an arena of public debate where citizens engage in rational deliberation and argumentation about issues of common concern, leading to the formation of public opinion. However, the normative ideal of the public sphere may not be entirely replicable in India where a complex set of relations based on social networks and historical forces impact individual participation in public life (Belair-Gagnon et al., 2013). It also does not account for the colonial and postcolonial histories, caste debates, and linguistically shaped realities of modern India (Udupa, 2015). India’s unparalleled population and diversity have shaped a fragmented and multi-layered public sphere (Ståhlberg, 2013) that manifests compromises and competition among communities. Rajagopal (2004) calls it the split public—a product of India’s myriad linguistic, caste-based, and developmental disparities.

Mediated public sphere deliberations in India unfold within a uniquely complex media ecosystem that includes communicative aspects of the industrial society, such as the legacy mass media, and nascent aspects of the network society typified by social media (Belair-Gagnon et al., 2013). The legacy media, especially newspapers, have historically played a pivotal role in shaping public discourse, and continue to retain their dominance through reach and representation (Belair-Gagnon et al., 2013).

The Indian newspaper landscape—broadly categorized into English- and regional-language press—comprises uniquely situated entities that reflect the linguistic, social and economic diversity of their audiences. Both have played distinct but interconnected roles in shaping public opinion around issues of public importance (Rajagopal, 2004). The English-language press is traditionally associated with the nationalist, English-speaking elites, considered the dominant intelligentsia (Ståhlberg, 2013; Rajagopal, 2004). They cater to a cosmopolitan, aspirational, middle-class urban readership and align with the corporate and policymaking elites (Udupa, 2015). Meanwhile, the regional-language press carries forward the debates of the majority population including the lower-middle-class and rural readers, reflecting and amplifying local/indigenous logics in cultural, social and political aspects (Rajagopal, 2004; Udupa, 2015). They typically have much larger circulation and are more accessible to the general population (Ståhlberg, 2013).

Regional newspapers in India have steadily increased their reach and influence since independence, contributing to the growth of media diversity in the country (Rao, 2010). Although their growth has challenged the dominance of the elite English-language press, leading to the formation of overlapping sub-spheres, English-language newspapers with a national profile still occupy the highest position in the Indian media hierarchy, notes Ståhlberg (2013). In the contemporary media ecosystem, digital journalism startups in India also orient their coverage, audience, and values towards leading English-language newspapers (Prasad, 2019), which continue to retain audience trust in today’s polymedia environment (Banerjee & Shukla, 2023). These considerations inform the selection of two of the most prominent English-language newspapers in India for this study.

1.2.2. Agenda Setting, News Framing and the Environmental Public Sphere

A derivative of the broader public sphere, the environmental public sphere is a discursive space where competing voices engage on environmental issues, influencing our understanding of and relationship with the environment. It is a domain-specific extension of the public sphere, which is activated when environmental concerns transition from latent issues to matters of public deliberation (Cox & Pezzullo, 2015). Hansen (2019) argues that there is nothing ‘natural’ or ‘accidental’ about environmental communication in the public sphere. It is carefully ‘constructed’ by various stakeholders, including the media, which is at the center of the environmental public sphere.

Follmann (2016) notes that the environmental public sphere in India is a vibrant but highly unequal space, following a well-ordered dichotomy of “environmentalism of the poor” and “bourgeois environmentalism” of the urban middle class focusing on “clean and green cities”. It is a dynamic arena shaped by a complex interplay of multiple actors including the media, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the judiciary. The educated middle class dominates this space, and their environmental ideology is often equated with the larger public interest (Follmann, 2016). Baviskar (2011) argues that the middle-class environmental pursuit of “cleaning up” the streets via order, hygiene, and safety through the public sphere often targets those who inhabit its margins including vendors, beggars, and street performers. Dominant English-language newspapers such as those sampled in this study actively endorse the bourgeois environmentalists’ sense of itself as the guardian of “public interest” (Baviskar, 2011).

Hansen (2019) asserts that probing whose accounts or definitions of the environment become prominent in the mediated environmental public sphere is critical in understanding whose interests are served and why some environmental claims succeed while others fail. This entails investigating two specific attributes within the public sphere framework: inclusiveness of mediated messages to reflect the myriad opinions, identities, ideologies and marginalized voices in public debates (Fischer & Jarren, 2024); and rational argumentation to convince others of the usefulness of a position through evidence-based deliberations (Garman, 2019).

The mass media’s influence on what the public thinks about and how the public thinks about issues is explained by agenda setting theory (McCombs & Shaw, 1972), which posits that the media legitimizes or marginalizes a story or certain aspects of it through selective coverage. As a critical process in mediated communication, agenda setting helps explain the media’s influence on public opinion via issue salience (Shoemaker & Reese, 1996), operationalized through prominence of coverage. Studies done in the Global South show that there is comparatively less media prominence accorded to environmental issues in developing countries, despite the severe environmental challenges impacting these regions. The media’s focus on economic development over environmental considerations poses a significant challenge in establishing the environment as a public concern in these countries (Mishra, 2020; Poornananda, 2022; Qusien & Robbins, 2024).

News framing, an inevitable and intrinsic part of news production, is another dynamic process that shapes mediated public sphere discussions. Frames offer a way to describe the power of communicating text that selects some aspects of perceived reality and makes it more salient (Entman,1993). At the heart of framing is the construction of meaning and concepts. The media is used as a powerful tool for environmental activism by different actors who strategically employ media frames to trigger public debates (Follmann, 2016). According to Hansen (2011), the media provides an important cultural context from which various publics draw frames of understanding to make sense of environmental issues. He explains how journalists generally rely on readily available frames when covering new or unfamiliar developments in environmental reporting. Some of the common frames identified in environmental coverage are the conflict frame, consequences frame, certainty/uncertainty frame, nature frame and responsibility frame (Hansen, 2011). As frames are repeated in news stories, they are retained in the minds of the public and policymakers (Mittal, 2012).

Simon and Xenos (2000) maintain that framing plays a central role in public deliberation by shaping how issues are socially constructed and interpreted over time. Different frames that represent contention or validity claims compete during the deliberative process (Simon & Xenos, 2000). The struggle over which frames should define our understanding of the environment is a central feature of the environmental public sphere (Cox & Pezzullo, 2015). Frame analysis is, thus, a potent tool to understand the media’s role in the construction and contestation of environmental issues in the public sphere (Hansen, 2019).

Taking these arguments into account, this study seeks to examine whether environmental news coverage in the sampled newspapers constructs environmental issues as public concerns through prominence of coverage, news framing, and inclusive and rational public deliberation. Specifically, the study investigates the following research questions:

RQ1: How prominent are environmental stories on the front pages of the sampled newspapers during the study period in terms of placement, story size, use of visual elements, and data journalism?

RQ2: Did front-page environmental reporting facilitate inclusive and rational deliberation on environmental issues and how?

RQ3: What role did news framing have in shaping the mediated environmental discourse?

2. Materials and Methods

Following a mixed methodology, two levels of analysis were conducted for the study. At the first level, quantitative content analysis (Berelson, 1952) was conducted to identify and classify environmental stories and gauge their prominence, topic diversity, and source diversity. At the second level, frame analysis was done on all the identified environmental stories.

2.1. Sampling

The study deliberately isolates English-language newspapers as the primary site of inquiry to focus on mediated public discourse targeting the political elite, corporate leaders, policymakers, and the urban middle class (Baviskar, 2011; Ståhlberg, 2013; Udupa, 2015). While English-language newspapers may not be representative of the marginalized rural populations who are most vulnerable to environmental crises, unlike their regional-language counterparts, their front pages offer a critical site to investigate how elite narratives either amplify or sideline the environmental realities of vulnerable populations (Baviskar, 2011).

Two national-level English-language newspapers, The Times of India and Hindustan Times, were selected through purposive sampling based on their high circulation, popularity, reach, and thereby greater agenda-setting role (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). The Times of India (TOI) is one of the oldest and most widely read newspapers in India, often touted as the world’s largest-selling English-language newspaper. Hindustan Times (HT) has the second-highest readership among English-language newspapers in India (Ravikumar et al., 2024). The New Delhi editions of both newspapers were selected considering their proximity to the political leadership and the readership they cater to, which includes the educated elite and the working class (Mittal, 2012). The study period is January to June 2023, marking six months soon after India assumed the G20 presidency in December 2022 when there was heightened discussion in the public sphere about the eco-centric theme of the summit and India’s push for sustainable development (Deb et al., 2023; The Hindu Bureau, 2023). A continuous sample of the entire corpus of newspaper issues over the six-month study period (360 issues) was taken for analysis. This was mainly for two reasons: (1) to control sampling bias of specific news developments and cover regular news days; and (2) to produce a sizable sample since stratified random sampling like a constructed week would not be adequate for front-page analysis of this scale.

2.2. Unit of Analysis

The unit of analysis is the environmental news story. An ‘environmental news story’ is defined as a story falling under any of the news categories listed in

Table 1. Environmental news categories.

Environmental News Category	Description
Animal Welfare	Protection of pets, domestic, stray and captive animals, birds, livestock, fisheries, and marine resources
Alternative Sources of Energy	Non-fossil fuel energy sources including solar, biomass, wind, and nuclear energy
Biodiversity	Importance of biodiversity; current status of biodiversity
Environment & Agriculture	GMO, environmental degradation due to farming and livestock industry, and organic food production
Environment & Culture	Impact of environmental problems on cultural heritage
Environment & Energy Conservation	Issues and developments related to conservation of environment and energy sources
Environmental Policies and Legislation	Environmental law, diplomacy, policy, debates
Forest Conservation	Afforestation, forest legislation, importance of forests, forest fires
Green Products and Practices	Related to environment-friendly products and practices such as green architecture
Natural Disasters	Large-scale extreme events resulting from natural or environmental phenomena
Natural Resources	Related to use and misuse of natural resources other than water
Pollution, Deforestation and Other Environmental Degradation	Includes air/water quality, noise pollution, desertification, deforestation, acid rain and acidification, degradation of ecologically sensitive area
Sustainable Development	Issues and developments related to sustainable development
Tourism and Environment	Environmental impact of tourism, ecotourism
Waste Management	Solid waste management, landfills, sewage systems
Water Conservation and Water Resources Management	Management and conservation of water as a natural resource
Weather Events	Extreme/severe/freakish weather, changes in weather patterns, global warming, greenhouse effect and discussions around climate change
Weather Updates	General weather reporting and forecasts
Wildlife and Ornithology	Related to threats, concerns and efforts to protect wildlife
Workplace Environment	Including work hazards and safety, pollution and toxic substances in the workplace (not general accidents)
Other	All other environmental topics that cannot be classified in any of the above

. The list was curated by drawing on the frameworks of environmental news reporting developed by Vilanilam (1993) and Djerf-Pierre (2012). While the basic structural template for environmental news categories was adopted from Vilanilam (1993), it was dynamically integrated with select issue categories from Djerf-Pierre’s (2012) model of environmental news discourse. The resulting framework was subsequently improvised to reflect the contemporary news culture of India, as well as the specific research objectives of this study.

All environmental stories published on the front pages (including additional front pages and front-page flaps) of the sampled newspapers were analyzed. For all variables except story placement, size, and visual elements, care was taken to analyze the entire story whenever it was carried over to the inside page.

2.3. Measuring Story Prominence

Story prominence is taken as an indicator of the relative news value assigned by editors to a news story, which, in turn, determines the audience’s awareness of the news event (Schulz, 1982). Prominence is operationalized by various factors, including placement, story size, use of visual elements (Schulz, 1982; Boukes et al., 2020), and data journalism (Tong & Zuo, 2019). While the selection of a story for the front page itself signifies prominence, within a page, newspapers give precedence to stories deemed “important” by placing them on the top of the page and providing more space in terms of story size and visual elements (Carter, 2013). Several studies have established the attention demanded by visual elements such as news photographs (Boukes et al., 2020). Nirmala and Aram (2018) studied how photographs enhanced the prominence of environmental stories. The use of data journalism is another indicator of prominence as it implies a calculated move to enhance audience engagement with visualizations and specific data sources, uncovering stories hidden in data with the assistance of technology (Tong & Zuo, 2019).

2.4. Measuring Inclusive and Rational Deliberations

The inclusion of diverse perspectives in environmental news coverage was assessed via topic and source diversity. Topic diversity was assessed by analyzing the distribution of stories across the news categories given in Table 1 above. To measure source diversity, the variables number of sources, routine and non-routine sources, and source categories were used.

Two levels of source categorization were implemented in the study. At the first level, routine and non-routine sources were differentiated. News reporting across beats is generally proven to rely heavily on routine sources of information (Shoemaker & Reese, 1996; McCombs et al., 2023). Routine sources are those that are systemic to media routines, are easily accessible, and are considered trustworthy and legitimate by default (Nimmo & Combs, 1983). These include news agencies, wire services, press conferences, government institutions/officials, and syndicated services. Over-dependence on routine sources tends to limit public discourse as elitist narratives, which, in turn, fails to produce fruitful debates in the public sphere (McCombs et al., 2023). Non-routine sources are by nature more challenging to categorize as they typically encompass unstructured exchanges between journalists and a diverse range of actors (Wheatley, 2020). While they often yield more exclusive and prestigious journalistic content, the non-routine source category effectively encapsulates all that does not fit into the conventional understanding of routine sources (Wheatley, 2020). The present study adopts this framework and categorizes all sources that do not meet the operational definition of routine sources outlined earlier as non-routine sources.

At the second level of source categorization, sources were classified into 13 different source categories based on their occupational or functional role in the public sphere. The representation of source categories such as scientists/experts and activists is critical in facilitating evidence-based, multi-perspective discussions around environmental issues. This, along with the variable data journalism, was used to interpret the level of rational deliberation via analytical, data-driven news narratives (Garman, 2019; Tong & Zuo, 2019).

2.5. Framing Parameters

Frame analysis was conducted to understand how and which aspects of environmental news are selected and projected by the two newspapers to create the “perceived reality” (Entman, 1993) of environmental issues in public discourse. Frames are manifested through various devices such as word count, word choice, metaphors, descriptions, depictions, and visuals (Gamson & Modigliani, 1987). To identify the parameters of frame analysis, an inductive analysis was conducted on a one-month pilot sample of both newspapers. This approach is inspired by Boykoff’s (2009) argument that alternative frames that may not be considered important currently should also be given consideration in frame analyses of media reporting. Unlike the deductive approach of adopting predefined frames from literature, the inductive approach to frame analysis involves formulating loosely defined frames initially to identify all possible frames (Tong, 2014). The month of March 2023 was selected for this inductive analysis as it represented a relatively routine news cycle without any major disruptive environmental event that could disproportionately influence the framing patterns. The pilot sample was subjected to iterative close reading guided by Entman’s (1993) four framing functions of problem definition, causal diagnosis, moral judgement, and remedy suggestion. The emerging patterns were refined and subsequently organized into two distinct framing parameters, each with its own typology. Stories were coded for the most prominent frames based on this. To establish the semantic validity of the frames, a subset of two stories representing each frame from the pilot sample were independently analyzed by a second coder. The framing typology was reviewed and finalized following this independent verification, as presented in

Table 2. Typology and definitions of environmental news frames.

General Frames
Ailing Planet (Karlberg, 1997)	Stories highlighting environmental problems such as environmental degradation, threats, and crises, as well as consequences of such problems. e.g., Weather trends show Capital no longer gets benign fog as polluted smog rules winter skies (HT, 4 January 2023)
Source of Conflict	Stories where the central issue is about the environment or environmental actors/developments becoming a source of conflict. e.g., Water crisis in city, Bharadwaj blames illegal Yamuna sand mining in Haryana (TOI, 8 March 2023)
Crisis Management	Stories that focus on efforts to resolve an environment-related problem after an environmental crisis has struck. e.g., Resettlement hangs fire in Joshimath as report awaited (HT, 4 April 2023)
Reason to Hope	Stories that report environmental developments that are likely to have positive repercussions in the future. e.g., How India’s coastal forests could become a goldmine (TOI, 21 April 2023)
Source of Pride	Stories related to the achievement of environmental and sustainable development goals. e.g., Skill devpt in green mode: Ministry HQ designed around 3 thriving trees (TOI, 27 May 2023)
Weather Info	Neutral stories that provide information on the weather. e.g., Light rainfall predicted today after wet Sunday (HT, 30 January 2023)
Other	Stories that cannot be included in any of the above frames. e.g., Tiger Anthem launched by TOI gets 100m views (TOI, 9 June 2023)
Environmental Problem Peg
Environment-related risks to humans	Stories focusing on losses, damage and difficulties to humans or human life due to an environmental issue. e.g., 26 families evacuated in ‘sinking’ Joshimath (TOI, 5 January 2023)
Environment-related risks to other forms of life	Stories focusing on losses and threats to nonhuman entities. e.g., Proposed changes to wildlife law could make species-saving research tougher, say experts (HT, 17 June 2023)
Environment-related risks to all life forms	A combination of the above two. e.g., Be careful about green nod to projects in ecologically fragile regions: House panel (TOI, 17 March 2023)
Unavoidable changes to environment	Stories that frame environmental development to be beyond human control or intervention. e.g., Summer-like temperatures in spring set off alarm bells (HT, 18 February 2023)
Scientific uncertainty	Stories that focus on lack of consensus in the scientific community regarding an environmental issue. e.g., Uncertainty over monsoon as US agency forecasts an early El Nino (TOI, 14 April 2023)
Economic impact	Stories focusing on the economic aspect of environmental developments. e.g., Centre forms panel to save wheat from heat (HT, 22 February 2023)
Other	Stories that do not fall in any of the above. e.g., Big buzz over aurora-like sighting in Ladakh skies (TOI, 7 May 2023)

.

The coding sheet thus developed was used by the author to manually code the full sample over a period of four months. To establish intercoder reliability, a second coder—a research scholar trained in communication research methodologies—independently coded 10% of the sample (n = 43) using the same coding sheet. Prior to this, the research scholar was briefed on the coding manual, and a trial run was conducted to ensure consistent application of the coding scheme. Intercoder reliability was established using Krippendorff’s alpha, a standard reliability test used in communication research (Kozina et al., 2019). The lowest alpha value obtained was 0.897 for the variable ‘number of sources’. This exceeds the commonly accepted threshold of 0.80 for satisfactory intercoder agreement (Marzi et al., 2024). Any ambiguities in the coding scheme identified during the reliability testing were clarified and incorporated into the final coding manual. Subsequently, the coded data was subjected to statistical analysis using the chi-square test. The completed coding sheets containing the coded data for both newspapers, along with the statistical analysis and frequency distribution documents, have been included in the supplementary materials.

3. Results

3.1. Story Prominence

Corresponding to RQ1, environmental reporting was well-represented on the front page of both the sampled newspapers, averaging one story per day. A total of 435 front-page environmental stories were identified and analyzed (HT = 214, TOI = 221) during the six-month study period, with environmental stories featuring as the main story on 32 days (HT = 14, TOI = 18).

The stories were well placed, with 40.2% of them (HT = 43.5%; TOI = 37%) positioned on the top half of the page and 35.2% along the fold in the middle (HT = 30%; TOI = 40.3%). More than half of the stories (54.5%) carried a visual element, and 41% measured above 30 column centimeters in size, including 5.3% above 100 column centimeters.

However, data journalism, which has implications for both story prominence and rational deliberation, was underutilized with only 21% of stories meeting the criteria overall. HT had comparatively more data journalism stories (26.6%) than TOI (15.8%).

3.2. Inclusive and Rational Deliberations

In response to RQ2, the findings reveal significant shortcomings in inclusive and rational deliberation, with notable lacunae in topic diversity, source diversity, and data journalism (as discussed above).

3.2.1. Topic Diversity

Although 21 environmental news categories were identified, stories were concentrated in the top five categories, which accounted for 77.6% (n = 337) of the corpus, revealing limitations in topic diversity. The remaining 16 categories combined have only 98 stories.

Weather emerged as the most prominent topic with the categories Weather Events and Weather Updates jointly occupying 42% of stories (n = 183). In addition, half of the environmental main stories (16 of 32) were weather-related. The category Weather Events alone accounted for more than a quarter of the stories (n = 114, 26.2%), ranking first in HT and second in TOI—where Pollution, Deforestation and Other Environmental Degradation topped the list. Pollution (n = 79, 18%) is also the second-largest individual news category overall, followed by Weather Updates (n = 69, 15.9%), Natural Disaster (n = 43, 9.9%), and Wildlife and Ornithology (n = 32, 7.4%) (

Table 3. Distribution of environmental news stories by Category in Hindustan Times and The Times of India.

Rank	News Categories	HT Count	TOI Count	Total	%
1	Weather Events	69	45	114	26.2069
2	Pollution, Deforestation and Other Environmental Degradation	28	51	79	18.16092
3	Weather Update	41	28	69	15.86207
4	Natural Disaster	18	25	43	9.885057
5	Wildlife and Ornithology	16	16	32	7.356322
6	Other	10	11	21	4.827586
7	Environment and Energy Conservation	3	14	17	3.908046
8	Water Conservation and Water Resources Management	2	6	8	1.83908
9	Environmental Policies and Legislation	6	1	7	1.609195
10	Alternative Sources of Energy	2	4	6	1.37931
11	Green Products and Practices	1	5	6	1.37931
12	Sustainable Development	5	1	6	1.37931
13	Waste Management	2	4	6	1.37931
14	Workplace Environment	1	4	5	1.149425
15	Animal Welfare	3	1	4	0.91954
16	Forest Conservation	2	2	4	0.91954
17	Environment and Agriculture	2	0	2	0.45977
18	Environment and Culture	0	2	2	0.45977
19	Natural Resources	1	1	2	0.45977
20	Biodiversity	1	0	1	0.229885
21	Tourism and Environment	1	0	1	0.229885
	TOTAL	214	221	435	100

).

3.2.2. Source Diversity

Close to half of the stories (47.5%) in the sample quote two or fewer sources, with 18.6% relying on a single source and 5.5.% attributing information to no source at all. Failing to quote sources or basing an entire story on a single source is considered poor journalistic practice. While three or more sources are generally accepted as a baseline for robust reporting (Catalan-Matamoros & Elías, 2020), the large proportion of stories relying on two or fewer number of sources undermines pluralistic, multi-perspective, and inclusive deliberation on environmental issues in the context of public discourse. Comparatively, HT quoted a greater number of sources per story. Figure 2 illustrates the distribution of sources quoted per story.

Both newspapers showed a clear dependency on routine sources, with overall 42.1% of stories quoting only routine sources and 38.9% stories quoting both routine and non-routine sources. In total, 81% of stories featured routine sources. This trend was comparable for both newspapers.

Of the 13 different occupational/functional source categories identified, government sources constituted the largest source category at 59% (HT = 61%; TOI = 56.4%) (

Table 4. Distribution of news sources by occupational and functional roles in Hindustan Times and The Times of India.

Source Type	HT	HT%	TOI	TOI%	TOTAL	%
Government source (government officials/documents/other government source)	466	60.99476	290	56.42023	756	59.20125
Scientist/expert	135	17.67016	71	13.81323	206	16.13156
Community member (members of the public/residents/affected individuals)	81	10.60209	78	15.1751	159	12.45106
Activist	22	2.879581	17	3.307393	39	3.054033
Foreign government source	17	2.225131	15	2.918288	32	2.505873
UN source	10	1.308901	10	1.945525	20	1.566171
Judiciary	5	0.65445	11	2.140078	16	1.252937
Other	6	0.78534	8	1.55642	14	1.096319
Foreign organization	10	1.308901	3	0.583658	13	1.018011
Private organization	1	0.13089	7	1.361868	8	0.626468
Politician	5	0.65445	3	0.583658	8	0.626468
News agency	5	0.65445	1	0.194553	6	0.469851
TOTAL	764	100	514	100	1277	100

), while scientists and experts accounted for only 16% (HT = 17.6%; TOI = 13.8%), environmental activists for 3% (HT = 2.8%; TOI = 3.3%) and community members 12.4%. HT had more scientists/experts quoted in its stories than TOI. However, this could be attributed to the higher number of sources quoted per story for HT in general.

3.3. Frame Analysis

Corresponding to RQ3, framing trends were broadly comparable across both newspapers. The Ailing Planet frame, which focuses on environmental problems, emerged as the most salient general frame (46.6%, n = 203) followed by Source of Conflict (13.6%), which reflects adversarial framing of environmental issues as irreconcilable conflicts between stakeholders (Karlberg, 1997). The remaining frames rank as follows: Weather Info (12.4%), Crisis Management (11%), Reason to Hope (8.3%), Source of Pride (5.1%), and Other (3%).

‘Environment-related risks to humans’ with 51% of stories (n = 222) emerged as the most pronounced environmental problem peg as per the second framing parameter. It was followed by the frames ‘unavoidable changes to the environment’ (17.2%), ‘risks to other forms of life’ (11.3%), ‘risks to all life’ (9.7%), other frames (5.5%), ‘economic impact’ (4.8%), and ‘scientific uncertainty’ (0.5%) (Figure 3).

Only two stories (0.5%) in the entire sample employed the ‘scientific uncertainty’ frame, indicating that scientific contestations or uncertainty are not a dominant feature of environmental reporting in the sampled media. Also notable is the ‘unavoidable changes to the environment’ frame, which ranked third overall (17.2%), reflecting a tendency to portray environmental developments as beyond human control or intervention—a framing that implicitly diminishes the perceived capacity of meaningful human agency in addressing environmental challenges.

The most dominant frame in this category is ‘environment-related risks to humans’. With more than half of the stories exclusively framed as posing ‘risks to humans’ and only 11.3% focusing specifically on ‘risks to other forms of life’, environmental issues are predominantly framed in a human-centric manner while marginalizing concerns of nonhuman entities. Furthermore, 4.8% of stories are framed around economic impact, another frame that foregrounds material human interest. Such a human-centric approach in environmental reporting suggests a tendency towards anthropocentrism—the ethical viewpoint that places humans at the center of the biosphere while subordinating nonhuman entities (Kopnina et al., 2018). The implications of anthropocentric narratives in environmental discourse are examined in Section 4. Overall, news framing was found to slant towards problem-centric, adversarial, and anthropocentric narratives. Figures representing the newspaper-wise comparative analysis of the variables environmental news categories, data journalism, placement of stories, routine sources, general frames, and month-wise distribution of stories have been included in the supplementary materials.

The findings of the study were further examined using chi-square analysis to test for associations between the variables and the environmental news categories.

3.4. Statistical Analysis

The chi-square analysis revealed significant association between all the study variables and environmental news categories in the combined dataset (

Table 5. Chi-square analysis results for Hindustan Times and The Times of India.

	Variables	HT			TOI			Combined
		χ2 Value	df	p-Value	χ2 Value	Df	p-Value	χ2 Value	df	p-Value
Content analysis categories	Visual Elements	24.728	5	0.001 *	6.616	5	0.251	22.194	5	0.001 *
	Data Journalism	64.84	5	0.001 *	48.926	5	0.001 *	118.663	5	0.001 *
	Number of sources	72.468	55	0.057	71.02	45	0.008 *	89.618	55	0.002 *
	Placement of Story	33.832	15	0.004 *	36.815	10	0.001 *	58.391	15	0.001 *
	Routine Sources	60.85	15	0.001 *	34.09	15	0.003 *	73.062	15	0.001 *
	Story Size	67.103	45	0.017 *	75.896	50	0.010 *	82.637	50	0.003 *
Framing categories	General Frames	310.310	30	0.001 *	265.551	30	0.001 *	554.854	30	0.001 *
	Environmental Problem Peg	224.351	25	0.001 *	251.288	30	0.001 *	449.211	30	0.001 *

*: Significant at 5% (p-value < 0.05).

). The content analysis variable data journalism and the two framing categories recorded the highest chi-square values. Newspaper-wise, HT recorded higher chi-square values for the variables visual elements, data journalism, number of sources, routine sources, and general frames, suggesting greater variation in reporting and general framing patterns across the news categories. TOI exhibited relatively higher chi-square values for placement of story, story size, and environmental problem peg, indicating stronger differences in story positioning and issue-specific framing. The variable visual elements was not found to be statistically significant in TOI, while number of sources did not attain statistical significance in HT.

4. Discussion

Front-page environmental news coverage in the sampled newspapers reflected the environmental crises impacting the country rather than the government’s sustainability-oriented and eco-centric discourse during the G20 presidency. Of the several flagship projects announced by the government during the period, only four were represented in the sample—the National Green Hydrogen Mission, the millet year initiative, E20 petrol launch, and the South African cheetah relocation project. All except the latter had one story each.

The study shows a marked convergence in both newspapers in terms of agenda setting and framing. At an average frequency of one story per day, prioritization of environmental issues on the front page was reasonable and consistent. The stories received prominence through their placement and use of visual elements. However, the coverage fell short of the normative conditions of public deliberation with limited evidence of inclusive and rational deliberation due to poor topic and source diversity, and underutilization of data journalism. The coverage was also constrained by an overreliance on a few dominant news frames.

Across all environmental news categories, coverage was largely episodic and event-driven (Boykoff, 2009; Mishra, 2020) rather than sustained by broader ecological concerns. Furthermore, both the newspapers, as elite urban media, tended to privilege issues relevant to their primary readership while underrepresenting the environmental concerns of rural and marginalized communities (Baviskar, 2011; Follmann, 2016; Udupa, 2015). Even within the dominant news categories of weather and pollution, reporting exhibited a pronounced urban bias. Issues that have direct implications for rural populations, such as environment–agriculture interlinkages and forest conservation, received minimal attention (Table 3).

The key findings of the study are discussed below.

4.1. Focus on Extreme and Unusual Weather Patterns

Weather-related stories dominated the sample, featuring on the front page every other day on average. The categories Weather Events and Weather Updates jointly accounted for 42% of stories (n = 183) in the combined dataset. Stories about extreme weather and erratic weather patterns were present throughout the six-month study period, which covered all three major seasons in India. While the winter and summer months featured stories on recurring cold and heat waves, in June, there was heightened discussion on the onset of the monsoon.

The extent of front-page coverage of weather events reflects India’s severe climate vulnerability (Mohanty & Wadhawan, 2021). The frequency and severity of these weather phenomena resulted in it being treated as an ‘event’, resembling event-driven coverage (Boykoff, 2009; Mishra, 2020). However, consistent front-page prioritization of weather events helped problematize weather-related crises as a matter of public concern, prompting the administration to address the crisis by seeking a response from the authorities. In addition, they had the utilitarian agenda of alerting the public about inclement weather and sharing critical information from the administration about taking precautionary measures. Notably, weather-related stories did not get drowned in issue competition (Djerf-Pierre, 2012), suggesting continued reader interest in the topic and supporting the observation that unlike industrialized countries that view climate change as a futuristic scenario, developing economies have a more local and present perspective towards the climate crisis (Mittal, 2012).

4.2. Shortcomings in Inclusive and Rational Deliberations

Journalists’ decisions about whom to source information from can subtly shape public understanding of issues (Gibson et al., 2015). The current analysis reveals a severe lack of diversity in the sources quoted. Around 81% of stories in the sample quote routine sources, and 59% of all the sources quoted are government sources. Many sources, especially official sources, are repeated across multiple stories, indicating a narrow source pool. The literature within and beyond the context of environmental journalism asserts the dominance of government officials as sources (Mittal, 2012; Keller et al., 2020; Poornananda, 2022), primarily due to journalists’ dependence on media routines (Shoemaker & Reese, 1996) and journalistic norms such as the reliance on conventional news values, the rush to meet deadlines, and quest for ‘timely’ news. These routines tend to cultivate complicity with official sources (Gibson et al., 2015), leading to authority-order bias (Boykoff, 2009). Reflecting on the role of news sources in environmental reporting in India, Poornananda (2022) says that the heavy reliance on government sources can be counterproductive as often the government is the key driver of environmentally harmful development projects.

Journalists’ slant towards routine sources proves costly for public sphere deliberations, evident from the low numbers in the other source categories in this study. It suggests highly uneven discursive access to various categories of claim-makers who are afforded limited visibility in the mediated environmental public sphere (Hansen, 2019). For example, the low percentage of the source category ‘community members’ (12.45%) shows the lacunae in the mediated construction of ordinary citizens’ voices. This echoes the findings of Kiflu et al. (2022), who demonstrate that the mainstream media largely hush voices of citizens to the margins of the public sphere. Such an imbalance in the representation of plural voices constrains the diversity of perspectives, leading to shortcomings in public deliberation.

The classic Habermasian idea is that public sphere discussions should be rational and evidence-based to convince others of the usefulness of a position, or opinion (Garman, 2019). However, the current study reveals a lack of scientific explanation and analytical deliberation in environmental stories, as evidenced by the low representation of scientists/experts (16%) and activists (3%) as sources. Although weather was the most salient issue domain in the sample, the coverage of weather events often lacked adequate reference to science, supporting the findings of previous studies (Mittal, 2012; Keller et al., 2020). Circling back to the argument on news routines, studies have shown how routines constrain journalists from exploring the complexity of the environment beat (Boykoff, 2009). This could explain the focus on event-centric reporting based on conventional news values rather than on context and scientific explanation.

Also relevant here is the inadequate utilization of data journalism, still a nascent field in India (Kashyap et al., 2020). Only 21% of the stories in the corpus accounted for data journalism, which has immense potential in environmental reporting by enabling elucidation of complex topics through data-driven analysis. However, the challenges to the adoption of data journalism are many, including lack of training for journalists and constraints imposed by media routines (Kashyap et al., 2020).

4.3. Problem-Centric, Adversarial, and Anthropocentric Framing

With the frames ‘Ailing Planet’ (46.7%) and ‘Source of Conflict’ (13.6%) together representing 60.3% of stories in the sample, coverage was markedly skewed towards problem-centric and adversarial narratives. By contrast, positive frames such as Reason to Hope (8.3%) and Source of Pride (5.1%) remained underrepresented. Heightened reporting on extreme weather, pollution, and natural disasters contributed to the Ailing Planet frame (‘Joshimath sank by 5.4 cm in just 13 days, says ISRO report’, HT, 14 January 2023). Meanwhile, persistent contentious coverage of man–animal conflicts (‘Kerala elephant who terrorized villagers released in reserve’, HT, 1 May 2023) and stakeholder disputes over environmental issues (‘After ISRO report, NDMA gags govt organizations’, TOI, 15 January 2023) is associated with the prevalence of the Source of Conflict frame.

Although alerting the audiences about environmental crises is an important responsibility of the media, the media logic of deploying “problem frames” often recontextualizes these issues, severely impacting public perception (Abalo & Olausson, 2023). Focusing environmental communication solely on harmful impacts is ineffective as it may lead to hopelessness and disengagement (Romeu, 2025). Similarly, adversarial frames tend to oversimplify complex environmental issues into conflicting dichotomies, hindering constructive dialogue (Karlberg, 1997; Boykoff, 2009).

The framing parameter environmental problem peg investigated the underlying tensions around which environmental issues were pegged. More than half of the stories (51%) are framed exclusively as ‘environment-related risks to humans’ and another 4.8% around ‘economic impact’, while only 11.3% stories focus specifically on ‘risks to other forms of life’. Thus, an overwhelming proportion of stories in the sample are pegged around the consequences faced by humans while relegating other environmental actors and nonhumans into the background, echoing studies from other countries about anthropocentric narratives perpetuated via environmental news discourse (Nicoletta & Yüksek, 2023; Saleem & Khattak, 2025). The low coverage of categories such as Wildlife and Ornithology (7%), Biodiversity (0.23%), Animal Welfare (0.91%), and Forest Conservation (0.91%) in the current sample adds proof to this.

The anthropocentric focus in the coverage stands in stark contrast to the eco-centric discourse that characterized India’s official G20 narrative. As discussed earlier, India has a long tradition of valuing the eco-centric way of life. The official theme of the summit—Vasudhaiva kutumbakam—finds its root in India’s ancient history and anti-colonial movement. This philosophy was prominently upheld by Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, two political and socio-cultural stalwarts of colonial India, who vociferously criticized the unsustainable anthropocentric development activities imposed on the country by the British (Sabareesh & Sony, 2022). Gandhi, through Hind Swaraj, envisioned an indigenous, eco-centric development approach as an alternative to Western anthropocentrism. Gandhi’s interpretation of ahimsa (nonviolence) as applicable to all forms of life problematized anthropocentric assumptions of human supremacy (Prajjwal & Kumar, 2025). In post-independence India, the Supreme Court has made observations in various cases, notably in T.N. Godavarman Thirumulpad v. Union of India in 1996, critiquing anthropocentric approaches in environmental jurisprudence (Shastri, 2013).

Anthropocentrism in public discourse has significant ramifications for policy formulation. Scholars argue that focusing on anthropocentrism is inadequate for biodiversity conservation as this concept inherently fails to protect nonhumans without utilitarian value, as evidenced by the mass extinction of species that do not directly affect humanity (Kopnina et al., 2018). Dobson et al. (2009) maintain that in lieu of their intrinsic value, nonhuman entities can be recipients of environmental justice, which can only be achieved by checking anthropocentric bias in public policy and governance. Citing how phenomena like climate change are affecting humans and nonhumans alike, post-humanist theorists say it is high time we reorganize our concepts to be more inclusive of all life on the planet by de-centering and repositioning humans as a co-species (Cielemęcka & Daigle, 2019). These arguments underscore the need to re-evaluate how influential and ubiquitous mass communication media like newspapers innocuously push anthropocentric narratives into the public agenda within the realm of environmental discourse.

5. Conclusions

In conclusion, the study reveals that front-page environmental news coverage in India’s leading newspapers The Times of India and Hindustan Times was instrumental in spotlighting the environmental crises impacting the country, rather than the government’s high-profile sustainability-oriented campaign during the G20 presidency. The coverage demonstrated the media’s agenda-setting role in elevating issues such as extreme weather and pollution as matters of public concern. However, the dominance of these categories came at a cost as several other environmental issues failed to get prominence or space on the front page. Meanwhile, the tendency to frame environmental issues as anthropocentric problems and conflicts may have narrowed the scope of public discourse around these issues. The coverage also failed to facilitate inclusive and rational deliberation (Habermas, 1989) on environmental issues due to a lack of plural voices and evidence-based, contextual reporting (Garman, 2019; Fischer & Jarren, 2024). The study recommends concerted efforts by the media to bring more representative coverage and analytical deliberations into the environmental discourse, in addition to a re-look at anthropocentric narratives dominating the mediated environmental public sphere. The study has its limitations with respect to the number of newspapers covered, restriction to front-page analysis, and focus on legacy media. Future studies could include the vernacular media and digital platforms for a more nuanced understanding of environmental news coverage and its impact on India’s variegated public spheres.