Spraying Paint on Stonehenge: The Framing of Climate Change Protest by the Leading Anglophone Media

Anglophone mass media frequently cover climate change protest actions associated with damage to famous artifacts and heritage sites. The present article introduces a qualitative study whose purpose is to shed light on how the leading Anglophone mass media frame an incident of spraying paint on Stonehenge, a UNESCO-protected World Heritage Site in the United Kingdom (the UK), by two members of the environmental group Just Stop Oil. The study involved a corpus of news coverages of the incident by the leading Anglophone mass media. The corpus was analyzed using a qualitative framing methodology. The results of the framing analysis revealed that the incident of spraying paint on Stonehenge was communicated via several qualitatively different types of frames (e.g., A Disgraceful Act of Vandalism). The article further discusses the findings through the prism of an ecolinguistic approach to the media framing of contemporaneous climate change protest actions. The study’s conclusions indicate that climate change protest actions nowadays are increasingly related to culturally significant artifacts and, particularly, UNESCO-protected World Heritage Sites.