FRAMING CLIMATE CHANGE IN NEWS DISCOURSE: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYTICAL STUDY

Abstract

Climate change is accepted as an environmental and scientific crisis with most of the public knowledge of the same being influenced through media discourse and not by scientific reports alone. This paper will utilize the Critical Discourse Analysis to explore the manner in which news media contextualize climate change and how these constructions interrelate to establish ideology, responsibility and power associations. Based on the three-dimensional model by Fairclough, the analysis assesses language features, discursive practices, and larger socio-political backgrounds in the chosen news articles on English. The experiment aims at analyzing the construction of urgency, uncertainty, and agency in terms of headlines, lexical decisions, modality, metaphors, and sourcing patterns. It is found that the news discourse will frequently shift between discussing the climate change as an immediate crisis and a political controversy, which may weaken the sense of urgency. Voting elite groups like politicians and corporate entities are often given a greater priority at the expense of scientists and victimized communities. In addition, the language hedging and individualization of blame divert the attention to structural and institutional reasons. The effects of these discursive strategies are that they normalize dominant economic interests, and create a perception on the part of the population that could be a barrier to effective climate action. The paper sheds some light on the critical analysis of media discourses as a way of fostering responsible and transformational environmental communication.