This paper explores how media representational practices shape and affect current international science and policy or practice communications, through a focus on climate change. Many complex factors contribute to these interactions. The norms and pressures that guide journalistic decision-making and shape mass-media coverage of anthropogenic climate science critically shape current discourses at the highly politicized climate science–policy interface. This paper investigates the multifarious journalistic, political, cultural and economic norms that dynamically influence media coverage of climate science. It explores the case-study of climate change to also work through factors shaping the translation of uncertainty in climate science. This project demonstrates that mass-media coverage of climate change is not simply a random amalgam of articles and segments; rather, it is a social relationship between scientists, policy actors and the public that is mediated by such news packages. Moreover, this research shows how mass media play a significant role in shaping the construction and maintenance of discourse on climate change at the interface of science and policy.