Climate change politics had a crucial turn in 2018 with young people rising to the role of the climate activist by the instigation of the student movement Fridays for Future (FFF). First in Sweden, then worldwide, the movement transformed the climate debate and positions therein, calling for intergenerational justice and more stringent action on climate change. Portugal is one of the countries where the FFF movement had considerable traction, joining with other youth movements around a shared (trans-)national program and making it part of the national agenda. This study examines the mainstream media portrayals of young climate activism in Portugal in the 2018-2024 period. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative evidence, we first distinguish between the emergence phase (2018-2021) and radicalization phase (2022-2024) of youth climate activism in Portugal. Next, we pay close attention to how news media discourse depicted the actions and the young climate activist persona in the two phases. Through an argumentatively oriented multimodal discourse analysis, we show that (i) in the first phase the news articles selectively legitimated the youth climate movement, albeit by restricting their claims and basic premises, and (ii) in the second phase the articles worked to partly delegitimize both the more disruptive actions and the persona of the young climate activist. We also show that these multimodal journalistic choices were in place largely irrespective of newspaper ideology. We discuss the dynamics of the mediated debate on climate change action and activism by highlighting the interplay between the activists’ protest repertoires and the multimodal journalistic choices.

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