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Climate Hypocrisies: A Comparative Study of News Discourse
Abstract
This paper conducts a comparative study of how the idea of hypocrisy was invoked in media coverage of climate change in 12 newspapers from four countries (Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) between 2005 and 2015. It develops the concepts, and explores the characteristics, of three distinct types of climate hypocrisy: personalized (which attacks the moral character of individuals based on inconsistencies between their stated beliefs and behavior); institutional-analytic (which identifies contradictions between institutional rhetoric and ongoing policies and practices); and reflexive (which develops sympathetic accounts of the struggles individuals face in reconciling the tension between values and actions). It explores how these types are used to undermine the credibility of climate advocates as well as to argue for more aggressive climate action, and maps out key features of climate hypocrisy discourse including ideological attributes, targeted actors and behaviors, affective intensity, and regional variations. It outlines a number of surprising key findings, such as (i) hypocrisy discourses are more frequently invoked by “progressives” supporting climate change action than by “conservatives” resisting climate change action, and (ii) while both groups use hypocrisy discourse, they tend to use very different types of hypocrisy discourses which each likely have very different impacts on climate change discourse.
... H5: Hay un gap entre actitudes y comportamiento (Juvan y Dolnicar, 2014), una hipocresía climática (Higham y Font, 2020;Gunster et al., 2018;Sanderson, 2023;Beck, 2023): Hay muchos viajeros que tienen actitudes favorables a cambiar los hábitos, pero después se comportan de otra forma distinta. ...
... Esto confirma las conclusiones a las que ya llegaron otros autores (Hadler et al. 2022) Los turistas más conscientes son los más viajeros, debido a que son los que más pueden ver los problemas que están aconteciendo. Pero esto también puede tener otra lectura, de que mucha conciencia climática no lleva a viajar menos, dándose así, de nuevo, una situación de hipocresía climática (Higham y Font, 2020;Gunster et al., 2018;Sanderson, 2023;Beck, 2023). ...
... En quinto y último lugar, la "H5: Hay un gap entre actitudes y comportamiento" confirma una hipocresía climática (Higham y Font, 2020;Gunster et al., 2018;Sanderson, 2023;Beck, 2023). Entre los que manifiestan actitudes favorables a cambiar, muchos de ellos después se comportan de forma distinta, teniendo prácticas que no favorecen la preservación del MA ni contribuyen a mitigar el CC. ...
El objetivo de esta investigación es analizar los hábitos de viaje que están dispuestos a cambiar los turistas para ser más respetuosos con el medio ambiente (MA) y mitigar su impacto en el cambio climático (CC). Partiendo de la perspectiva de la teoría crítica, en un primer momento analizamos los distintos tipos de acciones para la mitigación que van desde la inhibición de viajar hasta el negacionismo y la negativa a cambiar los hábitos, pasando por distintos tipos de mitigación como son la prevención, minimización, compensación para contrarrestar (ejemplo plantando árboles) e incluso pago por contaminar. Seguidamente exponemos los distintos factores individuales (sociodemográficos, culturales) y contextuales que están influenciando en la disposición a cambiar de hábitos. Tomamos los datos del Eurobarómetro y los analizamos con el programa Stata siguiendo la técnica de las Ecuaciones Estructurales Generalizadas (GSEM). Los resultados demuestran que existe una hipocresía climática y una clara diferencia comportamental entre el consumo turístico y el consumo cotidiano. Los más dispuestos a cambiar son las personas con formación elevada, las mujeres y los jóvenes. La riqueza de los países influye positivamente en la disposición a pagar más para proteger el medio ambiente o beneficiar a la comunidad local, pero influye negativamente en otros hábitos, lo cual demuestra que los habitantes de los países ricos no son necesariamente los más concienciados ni los que tienen unas actitudes más proclives para ser respetuosos con el MA y mitigar el CC.
... In our past work on hypocrisy rhetoric, a quantitative and qualitative analysis spanning ten years (2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015) of media coverage of all news stories that invoked climate change, global warming and hypocrisy in a dozen of the most popular English language daily newspapers in the Anglosphere (892 stories in total), we identified four dominant variants of hypocrisy discourse falling under two broad subcategories, conservative and progressive (Gunster, Fleet, Paterson, & Saurette, 2018a. Conservative articulations of hypocrisy were defined as such based upon their approach to climate change action-either tolerating a limited response to the climate crisis, or in some cases, denial of anthropogenic climate change altogether. ...
... Ultimately, though, this hypocrisy is welcomed by conservative positions as a vindication of their belief of the self-destructive logic at the heart of calls to climate action. Thus, opponents of climate action have a love/hate relationship with hypocrisy: seemingly outraged with its ubiquity amongst liberal elites, they also confidently endorse it as evidence of the merits and reality of their opposing-action worldview (Gunster et al., 2018a(Gunster et al., , 2018b. ...
... Compared to the often more neutral language of the progressive institutional hypocrisy mode, conservative accusations, both cynical and lifestyle forms, were consistently charged with evocative and simplified anecdotes and emotionally caustic rebukes. They were significantly more likely than progressive forms to use language that evokes negative feelings towards their subjects as well as to cultivate general sentiments of outrage and disgust for their targets (Gunster et al., 2018a(Gunster et al., , 2018b. A National Post piece, "There's no hypocrite like a rich, jet-setting anti-global warming one" by conservative columnist, Rex Murphy, succinctly captures this tone. ...
India has made commitments at the global level towards supporting sustainable development goals and is progressing towards achieving them. Its position in the composite sustainable development index improved from 57 in 2018 to 60 in 2019 (Economic Survey 2019–2020, Government of India, in Sustainable development and climate change, Chapter 6, 2:167–192, 2020). This chapter aims at documenting and assessing policy measures adopted by government of India towards sustainable consumption with a special focus on policies towards energy efficiency. Energy consumption in India has been growing at an average growth rate of 5.3 per cent from the last five years, 2013–2017. India’s share in global energy consumption has reached 5.6 per cent in 2017 (BP statistical review of world energy, 2018). With economic growth the energy consumption is expected to increase manifold in future. Energy consumption results in emissions leading to air pollution. Nine out of the ten most polluted cities in the world are in India. Vehicular emissions and industrial pollution are major factors for air pollution. The government of India has undertaken various policy measures towards energy conservation and efficient use of energy. While some of the policy measures target industries, other policy measures aim at sustainable consumption via demand-side policies. Energy consumption labels inform consumers of the relative efficiency of different products and are going to be effective if consumers are willing to pay a higher price for the energy-efficient products once information is provided. The chapter also includes a discrete choice experiment (DCE) conducted to investigate whether car drivers in New Delhi, India, value fuel-efficient cars. The DCE was designed to estimate consumers’ willingness to pay for star labelled cars in New Delhi and estimate the impact of socio-economic characteristics such as income and education in influencing consumers’ willingness to pay. The experiment is conducted in two districts of Delhi, South Delhi and East Delhi. The two districts differ in socio-economic characteristics such as affluence, education, occupational structure, etc. These differences have an interesting bearing on the results. We find that the South Delhi respondents have a stronger preference for high star label car and on average, are willing to pay 5050 US Dollars for the five star label car as compared to 1186 US Dollars by East Delhi respondents.
... In our past work on hypocrisy rhetoric, a quantitative and qualitative analysis spanning ten years (2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015) of media coverage of all news stories that invoked climate change, global warming and hypocrisy in a dozen of the most popular English language daily newspapers in the Anglosphere (892 stories in total), we identified four dominant variants of hypocrisy discourse falling under two broad subcategories, conservative and progressive (Gunster, Fleet, Paterson, & Saurette, 2018a, 2018b. Conservative articulations of hypocrisy were defined as such based upon their approach to climate change action-either tolerating a limited response to the climate crisis, or in some cases, denial of anthropogenic climate change altogether. ...
... Ultimately, though, this hypocrisy is welcomed by conservative positions as a vindication of their belief of the self-destructive logic at the heart of calls to climate action. Thus, opponents of climate action have a love/hate relationship with hypocrisy: seemingly outraged with its ubiquity amongst liberal elites, they also confidently endorse it as evidence of the merits and reality of their opposing-action worldview (Gunster et al., 2018a(Gunster et al., , 2018b. ...
... Compared to the often more neutral language of the progressive institutional hypocrisy mode, conservative accusations, both cynical and lifestyle forms, were consistently charged with evocative and simplified anecdotes and emotionally caustic rebukes. They were significantly more likely than progressive forms to use language that evokes negative feelings towards their subjects as well as to cultivate general sentiments of outrage and disgust for their targets (Gunster et al., 2018a(Gunster et al., , 2018b. A National Post piece, "There's no hypocrite like a rich, jet-setting anti-global warming one" by conservative columnist, Rex Murphy, succinctly captures this tone. ...
Climate change is often presented as a super wicked problem, displaced over space and time, requiring constant re-evaluation and without agreed-upon solutions. If climate change is indeed a super wicked problem, then might it also invite an equally difficult set of super wicked dilemmas? Hypocrisy draws attention to the most salient aspect of such a dilemma: we’re all part of the problem but in ways that often render suspect the claim that individual lifestyle actions are the solution. In the context of the need for urgent climate change action, we pose accusations and admissions of hypocrisy as a type of super wicked provocation, equally displaced over time and space, necessitating ongoing self and institutional re-examination without offering clear or salient choices for sustainable consumption, but nevertheless inviting important conversations. Drawing on existing quantitative and qualitative research showing that hypocrisy discourse is not simply a sensationalist PR strategy of conservatives but is rather a broad, significant and multifaceted form of climate change discourse, we engage with the varied modes of hypocrisy language in contemporary English language legacy media. In doing so, we will offer both practical and theoretical tools for environmental communicators, scholars and students to consider if, and how, hypocrisy can act as fertile terrain for pro-climate action.
... Indeed, there is additional motivation for such academics to track their carbon footprints: the size of a climate researcher's carbon footprint from air travel (specifically for work-related purposes like lectures and conferences) has been shown to affect their credibility in the eyes of the public (Attari et al., 2016). Furthermore, a ten-year study of English-speaking media coverage found that 32% of all accusations of hypocrisy levelled against pro-climate actors mentioned their flying behaviourmore than for luxury behaviours, driving, or diet (Gunster et al., 2018). Yet pro-environmental behaviours are contextually driven; individuals are more likely to undertake pro-environmental behaviours in their home than at a hotel, for instance (Baker et al., 2014;Miao and Wei, 2013). ...
... For instance, defenders of Al Gore's air travel while filming and promoting An Inconvenient Truth suggest that the importance of his message compensates for his emissions from flying (Olson, 2007). The case of Gore's travel raises a more general problemthe fact that the air travel of climate researchers has been frequently used in ad hominem attacks on re searchers, climate delegates, and environmentalists (Gavin and Marshall, 2011;Gunster et al., 2018). ...
Lowering the growth in greenhouse gas emissions from air travel may be critical for avoiding dangerous levels of climate change, and yet some individuals perceive frequent air travel to be critical to their professional success. Using a sample of 705 travellers at the University of British Columbia, we investigated the influence of career stage, research productivity, field of expertise, and other variables on academic air travel and the associated emissions. This is the first time that research has evaluated the link between observed air travel and academic success. First, we compared air travel behaviour at different career stages and found that individuals at the start of their careers were responsible for fewer emissions from air travel than senior academics. Second, since career advancement may depend on an academic's ability to form partnerships and disseminate their research abroad, we investigated the relationship between air travel emissions and publicly available bibliometric measurements. We found no relationship between air travel emissions and metrics of academic productivity including hIa (h-index adjusted for academic age and discipline). There was, however, a relationship between emissions and salary that remains significant even when controlling for seniority. Finally, based on the premise that academics studying topics related to sustainability may have greater responsibility or motivation to reduce their emissions, we coded 165 researchers in our sample as either “Green” or “Not-green.” We found no significant difference between Green and Not-green academics in total air travel emissions, or in the types of emissions that might be easiest to avoid. Taken together, this preliminary evidence suggests that there may be opportunities, especially for academics who study topics related to climate and sustainability, to reduce their emissions from air travel while maintaining productive careers.
... We conduct a detailed quantitative analysis of these articles elsewhere (Gunster et al., 2018), mapping the distribution of key characteristics such as pro-vs. anti-climate action orientation, presence of climate science denial, targeted actors and behaviors, affective intensity and the prominence of three distinct types of hypocrisy discourse (personalized, institutionalanalytic, reflexive). ...
... These observations obviously raise many more questions than we can explore here (including whether various political perspectives have distinctly identifiable rhetorical tendencies/preferences when debating contemporary climate change policy). Some of these questions are further discussed in Gunster et al. (2018). Others are the subject of ongoing research and will be explored in future publications. ...
This paper interrogates how the notion of hypocrisy is invoked in relation to climate change and offers two key findings. First, it demonstrates that invocations of hypocrisy are not only deployed by conservative opponents of climate action, but also by progressive proponents of such action. Second, this article shows that while hypocrisy discourse is used to support both anti- and pro-climate change perspectives, its nature and function fundamentally differs depending on who is using it. The article identifies four discrete types of climate hypocrisy discourse. Conservatives who reject climate change action tend to use two “modes” of hypocrisy discourse. The first is an “individual lifestyle outrage” mode that cultivates outrage about the hypocritical behavior and lifestyle choices of climate activists to undermine the urgency and moral need for climate change action. The second, an “institutional cynicism” mode, encourages a cynical fatalism about any proposed governmental action regarding climate change by suggesting that governments are necessarily climate hypocrites because of the economic and political impossibility of serious emissions reductions. In contrast, progressives use hypocrisy discourse in two different modes. The first involve an “institutional call to action” mode that uses charges of hypocrisy to attack government inaction on climate change and demand that effective action be taken in line with their public commitment to climate action. Secondly, they also employ a “reflexive” mode in which explorations of the ubiquity of climate change hypocrisy illuminate the dilemmas that virtually all responses to climate change necessarily grapple with in our current context. Overall, the article seeks to contribute to our understanding of climate change communications by (i) showing that hypocrisy discourse is not simply a sensationalist PR strategy of conservatives but is rather a broad, significant and multi-faceted form of climate change discourse; and (ii) suggesting that certain modes of hypocrisy discourse might not only represent genuine attempts to make sense of some of the fundamental tensions of climate change politics but also help us understand the challenge that the “entanglement” of personal agency/choice within broader political structures presents, and thus heighten positive affective commitments to climate change action.
... Supporting our results, the fear of coming across as moralising plays a central in how people communicate their environmental engagement and emotions to others (Täuber et al, 2015;Grauel, 2016;Gunster et al, 2018). Neckel and Hasenfratz (2021) argue that people who appear highly engaged in sustainable behaviour are often met with emotional resistance manifested as criticism of moralisations. ...
Environmental problems abound and it can be difficult for individuals to know how to act for the best. Moreover, knowing how we should feel about these problems and our potential actions has become increasingly unclear and confusing. Navigating these complexities involves reflecting on one’s own and other people’s emotions. This article explores how individuals put their emotional reflexivity to use in relation to two specific environmental emotions: eco-guilt and eco-shame. We conducted 20 in-depth interviews with Danish citizens about their experiences and emotions connected to being consumers in these times of substantial environmental challenges. A chief part of this emotional reflexivity involved judgements about whether it was good or bad to experience eco-guilt and eco-shame. These judgements were often made with reference to how useful the emotions were in motivating pro-environmental behaviour and whether or not the emotions were authentic. Some respondents expressed a strong sense that they ‘ought to’ experience eco-guilt and eco-shame, while others showed resistance to experiencing these emotions and the perceived social pressure to be more sustainable. Exploring emotional reflexivity around eco-guilt and eco-shame provides insights into the social and moral forces that pull people in different – and at times conflicting – directions regarding their feelings about environmental issues. We discuss our results in light of an emotional regime imposing on individuals the sense that they ought to experience emotions of care for the environment.
... Opponents of change, particularly the fossil fuel industry, have for decades exploited and nurtured moral disengagement, first casting doubt about the existence of climate change and increasingly through a climate action delay discourse [28,29]. Consequently, public climate change debate is dominated by the discourse of climate action delay focussing on monetary costs of actions rather than the human costs and, ultimately, the moral implications of inaction [30][31][32][33]. As Wetts [33] shows, even environmental organisations tend to undermine their own mobilisation efforts by adopting a technocratic climate change discourse. ...
Meeting the Paris Agreement will require unprecedented social change that goes hand in hand with technological and economic innovations. Research suggests that normative change, the change in what is perceived as normal or morally acceptable, can drive wider large-scale social change, i.e., change in legislation, policy, and behaviour. Normative change often starts with a normative challenge, i.e., practices considered normal, come to be seen as morally repugnant. In this paper we explore the normative challenge posed by Fridays for Future, analysing computationally a large data set of tweets in the context of this protest movement to understand the normative framework that challenges business as usual. We show that Friday for Future’s normative framework makes the shared, unjust casualty experience of young people because of the unmitigated climate crisis accessible to the public. The victims are now in spatial, temporal, and social proximity, they are our children and grandchildren, and this makes the normative challenge of the status quo (continuation of fossil-fuel based economy) so potent. The normative framework references human rights and duty of care when establishing an anti-fossil-fuel norm and prescribes solidarity with climate victims in the Global South, activism and seeking solutions that are based in science.
... Greta Thunberg and the climate strike are perhaps most prominent in this group, which also includes the Flight Free and flygskam ("flying shame") movements. As the reference to shame indicates, those in this camp make frequent use of hypocrisy charges; indeed, Gunster et al.'s (2018a) review of traditional media found more charges of hypocrisy from pro-climate-action arguers than from skeptics. Particularly since Thunberg's muchpublicized sea voyage to North America, climate scientists' flying has come under attack, often in harsh terms. ...
I inquire into argument at the system level, exploring the controversy over whether climate scientists should fly. I document participants’ knowledge of a skeptical argument that because scientists fly, they cannot testify credibly about the climate emergency. I show how this argument has been managed by pro-climate action arguers, and how some climate scientists have developed parallel reasoning, articulating a sophisticated case why they will be more effective in the controversy if they fly less. Finally, I review some strategies arguers deploy to use the arguments of others against them. I argue that only by attending to argument-making at the system level can we understand how arguers come to know the resources for argument available in a controversy and to think strategically about how to use them. I call for more work on argument at the system level
... To deal with inconsistency between progressive rhetoric and cautious action, most governments resort to hypocrisy (Geden, 2016, p. 5). Gunster et al. (2018) show that charges of hypocrisy can be used to undermine the credibility of climate advocates, but are more commonly invoked by progressives seeking more ambitious climate action. The impact of insincerity and hypocrisy on global climate and environmental governance, as well as citizens' efforts to hold actors to account, clearly warrants greater research. ...
There is a significant deficit of ‘ecological integrity’ in contemporary climate change governance, defined as explicit recognition of the mismatch between rhetoric, intentions and actions. This deficit is not unique to climate governance: we live in an age of bullshit (indifference to the truth). Philosopher Harry Frankfurt (On bullshit, 2005, Princeton University Press) identifies this as ‘one of the most salient features of our culture’. In this article, I argue that the concept captures the inconsistencies we observe in global climate governance. I begin by conceptualizing it and identifying the various forms it can take. I then provide an overview of the past three decades of global climate governance, before analysing illustrative examples of bullshit. I conclude by proposing reforms to the climate regime’s accountability arrangements to enhance the integrity and limit the harmful effects of bullshit in global climate governance.
... And most recently Bressler (2021) published an estimate for number of deaths caused by the emissions of one additional metric ton of CO2. And yet public climate change debate is still dominated by the discourse of climate delay focussing on monetary costs of actions rather than the human costs and utlimately moral implications of inaction (Brüggemann & Engesser 2017, Gunster et al. 2018, Lamb et al. 2020, Wetts 2020. But, more recently the public framing of climate change has seemingly started to shift, which thas been partly attributed to climate protest movements, and in particular Fridays for Future, who started their protest actions in 2018 (Thakeray et al. 2020, von Zabern & Tulloch 2021. ...
Meeting the UN Paris Agreement will require unprecedented social change that goes hand in hand with technological and economic innovations. Research suggests that normative change, the change in what is perceived as morally acceptable, can drive wider large-scale social change, i.e., change in legislation, policy and behaviour. In this paper we explore the normative challenge posed by Fridays for Future. Basing the analysis on a theoretical understanding of norms and normative change, we analyse computationally a large data set of tweets in the context of this protest movement to understand the normative narrative that challenges the business as usual and that has the potential to trigger wider social change. We discuss what it would take for the normative framework that Fridays for Future offers to spread and what this could mean for wider social change. We also reflect on the necessity of further research on how social change can be accelerated in response to the climate crisis.
As the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) convened, the climate issue remained a focal point of coverage in both Chinese and American mainstream media. This paper seeks to explore the linguistic features of news discourse of climate change in China and the United States and the discursive strategy applied to strengthen national ideologies. Taking the reports on climate change in China Daily and Los Angeles Times within 2 months after COP27 as the research corpus, this paper examines the language features, the discursive processes of the text and possible social factors through a combination of corpus linguistics(CL) and critical discourse analysis(CDA) under the framework of Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Model of Discourse. The finding suggests that both countries enhance national ideologies by constructing a responsible national image through objective climate reporting. Chinese media tends to focus on national efforts to improve ecological environment and global cooperation, while US newspaper attaches importance to climate security and pursues a leading position in global ecological governance.
En el intento de cartografiar el complejo universo del debate global sobre la cuestión medioambiental, la investigación aplica el proceso de modelos de análisis lingüístico para extraer los contenidos semánticos representados en las conversaciones de los internautas. La lingüística computacional permite recrear un marco semántico y contenidos del debate online sobre el cambio climático a base de los avanzados modelos estadísticos. Para ellos, se eligió un marco temporal específico para mapear el discurso digital de los ciudadanos en Twitter sobre el fenómeno del cambio climático y centrarse en los incendio en Australia, Greta Thunberg y la cumbre de COP25.
The study looks into the existing gaps in the newsrooms of the selected editions of the Hindi language newspapers reporting on the issues of climate change. It analyses how climate change stories especially landslide news are covered and reported and are prioritised in daily reporting assignments. It used cross-sectional, descriptive, exploratory, and qualitative methods. The primary data was collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with the working journalists and editorial staff of the selected newspapers. The study approached content analysis to extract themes in the reportage of issues where the newspapers played a crucial role in developing people's perception about climate change by using their considerable public trust to build acceptance through small narratives. It was observed that the connection between climate change and the local event is seldom made in climate reportage. Although the damage caused was reported extensively, there is little introspection by the newspapers as to the reasons for such catastrophic events. The study finds that there is little to no connection is made to the significance of anthropogenic factors in causing the disaster in all the observed news stories. The attribution to climate change appears mostly in the form of vague throwaway statements or brief quotes from experts.
News coverage of the Thunberg-inspired student climate strikes in Australia in 2019 and 2020 framed school leaders ‘in conversation’ with politicians, education system spokespeople, political pundits, the public and student activists. While previous scholarly interest has mainly focused on the student protestors, we examine the intertextual framing of school leaders in the news. While our analysis affirms previous understandings of the politically divided nature of climate change communication, it also reveals that school leaders’ agency was constrained by the discursive effects of news reporting. Moreover, the antagonisms and polarisation of views in news and commentary created a circulation of affective intensities that amplified the challenges for principals. We assess the implications of these framings and their effects on the agency of school leaders. We conclude by arguing for more proactive leadership and advocacy by school leaders to support the participation of students in politics and activism for climate justice.
Climate activists and environmental communicators stress that addressing the climate crisis requires both global and local advocacy for transformational change-making. While journalists in small, rural communities are known to actively advocate on issues for the common good, there has been little investigation of local media advocacy on climate change in rural Australia: a region at the forefront of global heating. This paper analyses the accounts of local journalists of their media coverage of the School Strikes 4 Climate in rural and regional Australia, as an empirical entry point for a conceptual discussion of local media advocacy in reporting climate change. We find that normative ideas about journalism coupled with polarised community views on climate change hindered these journalists from taking an advocacy stance. We explore and critique the tacit ‘quiet advocacy’ practices used by these journalists reporting on climate in rural and regional Australia.
Advocacy bias is characterized by a preponderance of published articles that support an academic discipline’s favored causes and paradigms, and by the consequent relative absence of bias countering skeptical/falsifying publications. Such imbalance between paradigm/cause advocates and skeptics can be an indication of a research process that has been corrupted by a widely shared scholarly desire to generate supportive results. The current research makes an empirical contribution to the advocacy bias literature with a content analysis based framework that assesses the level of green marketing (GM) advocacy bias among 107 GM related articles from marketing’s Financial Times (FT) list journals and 9 GM related special issues (SI). Evidence of widespread GM advocacy bias is indicated by the almost complete lack of GM skeptical/falsifying articles. It is hoped that this first empirical examination of advocacy bias within the marketing discipline will inspire more discussion and research on the topic.
In this chapter we interrogate relations between masculinities and climate politics by focusing on global elites. The positionality of elite actors as white, wealthy, cis-gendered men is usually ignored, even by critical scholars of climate politics. We characterise their strategies as expressing “imperial masculinity”: that is, they assume they can use their extreme wealth to insulate themselves from climate insecurities. However, these strategies to make themselves invulnerable to climate disasters are ultimately hubristic. While climate impacts are indeed highly unequal, many of the places elite men use to display their wealth are highly climate fragile. We use the example of Richard Branson and his Caribbean island to illustrate how hyper-elite men are indeed subject to climate impacts in ways that exceed their attempts to make themselves impregnable to the consequences of climate change.
As carbon emissions continue to rise, the need to adapt to climate impacts has become increasingly urgent. Planning and implementing climate adaptation is often left to local authorities and is fraught with the challenge of negotiating with multiple stakeholders holding differing interpretations of climate change. In such a space, local media has a critical role in communicating these differing perspectives within communities. In this article we explore the central role of a local newspaper in shaping public debate over the implementation of a climate adaptation plan in a coastal region of Australia. Rather than providing an arena for public discussion and constructive debate, we find that the newspaper adopted a clear position rejecting the need for changes in planning for anticipated climate impacts. We use the case study to explore how media discourse contributes to (i) the construction of an antagonistic debate undermining climate science, and (ii) strengthening the hegemony of economic value and property rights. In response, we suggest shoring up political alliances for climate change, including in the local media, as a basis for social change.
Scholars and practitioners are engaging in a fierce debate over the implications of using market-based discourse in communicating environmental problems and solutions. However, there has been less attention to exactly who is using such economic discourse and how it is combined with other discourses. Prior researchers have proposed tripartite frameworks for categorizing discursive strategies around pro-economic, anti-economic, and non-economic metaphors, which are here applied to eight U.S. environmental advocacy organizations’ press releases. An original text-analytic dictionary of pro-economic, anti-economic, and non-economic discourse is used to distinguish between the proposed discourse strategies. This analysis indicates that economics-oriented discourse strategies are more complex and varied than previously suggested. A more nuanced framework is proposed. © 2019
This article extends the research on media communication of climate change by exploring UK newspapers' representations of public opinion polls. Based on a rereading of main stories on opinion polls between 1989 and 2008, the article shows how polls have been employed by "prestige" newspapers and tabloids to (a) close or keep open the public debate on the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and (b) to propagate favored responses to climate change at the policy and individual level. Furthermore, newspapers' representations of these opinion polls have conveyed questionable images of a denying, apathetic, and hypocritical public. The article concludes that such images potentially compromise the development of new links among citizens, scientists, and politicians and efforts to widen public engagement with climate change.
The idea of climate change inspires and reinforces disagreements at all levels of society. Climate change's integration into public life suggests that there is no evident way of framing and tackling the phenomenon. This brings forward important questions regarding the role of ideology in mediated public discourse on climate change. The existing research literature shows that five ideological filters need to be taken into account to understand the myriad ways in which ideology plays a role in the production, representation, and reception of climate change in (news and entertainment) media: (i) economic factors, (ii) journalistic norms, (iii) political context, (iv) ideological cultures, and (v) citizen decoding. Furthermore, two different interpretations of how ideology precisely serves as a filter of social reality underlie this literature: an interpretation of ideology as an independent variable, on the one hand, and as a constitutive practice, on the other. Moreover, these interpretations underlie a broader discussion in the social sciences on the relation between climate change and ideology and how scholars and activists should deal with it. By considering climate change as a post-ideological issue, a first perspective problematizes the politicization of climate change and calls for its depoliticization to foster consensus and public engagement. In response, a second perspective takes aim against the post-politicization and post-democratization of climate change (resulting from the adoption of the first perspective) for suppressing the role of ideology and, as a result, for stifling democratic debate and citizenship with regard to the climate issue. This latter perspective is in need of further exploration in future research, especially with regard to the concepts of ideological fault lines, ideological hegemony, and ideological strategies.
In December 2009, considerable media attention was devoted to climate change as global leaders gathered in Copenhagen for a two-week summit to negotiate an extension to the Kyoto Protocol. This article conducts a discourse and content analysis of how regional media in British Columbia covered the event, with a particular focus on how climate politics was framed. A wide range of sources encompassing different media and different ownership structures was analyzed. Debates about climate science played very little role in media coverage. Conversely, focus on the summit ensured that the political dimensions of climate change played a central role. Climate politics, however, was framed in very different ways by mainstream and alternative media. RESUME En decembre 2009, on porta une attention mediatique considerable sur le changement climatique lorsque des dirigeants mondiaux se sont rassembles a Copenhague pour un sommet de deux semaines afin de negocier une extension du protocole de Kyoto. Cet article effectue une analyse de discours et de contenu sur la maniere dont des medias regionaux en Colombie-Britannique ont couvert l’evenement, en portant une attention particuliere a la maniere dont on presenta les politiques sur le climat. Nous avons analyse un vaste eventail de sources comprenant des medias et des structures de propriete differents. Les debats sur la science du climat ont joue un role etonnamment restreint dans la couverture mediatique. En revanche, l’attention portee au sommet etait telle que les aspects politiques du changement climatique y ont joue un role central. Les medias dominants, cependant, ont presente les politiques sur le climat tres differemment par rapport aux medias alternatifs.
This article presents a critical discourse analysis of the principal storylines through which the Calgary Herald framed the oil sands between May 1, 2010, and May 31, 2011. The analysis reveals that rather than avoid coverage of environmental protests and critiques, the Herald’s narratives used these events to portray the oil and gas industry (and the province and people of Alberta) as victims of an aggressive and well-funded global environmental lobby. This framing not only defends the industry by dismissing environmental criticism of the oil sands as ill-informed and ideologically motivated, it also champions the idea that the provincial government must become a promotional petro-state whose main role is to actively defend the industry. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Cet article partage les resultats d’une analyse de discours critique des narratifs utilises par le Calgary Herald du 1er mai 2010 au 31 mai 2011 a propos des sables bitumineux. Notre analyse demontre que le Calgary Herald n’evite pas les questions et critiques environnementales. Nous avons plutot trouve que le Herald les utilisent pour representer l’industrie du petrole (et, par extension, la province et les citoyens de l’Alberta) comme des victimes de campagnes mediatiques agressives subventionnees par de puissantes ONG. Nous suggerons que cette strategie discursive non seulement rejette toute critiques comme ignorants et ideologiques. Ca justifie aussi l’idee que le gouvernement de l’Alberta doit devenir un « petro-Etat » en defendant plus activement les interets de l’industrie.
Would you follow advice about personal energy conservation from a climate specialist with a large carbon footprint? Many climate researchers report anecdotes in which their sincerity was challenged based on their alleged failure to reduce carbon emissions. Here, we report the results of two large online surveys that measure the perceived credibility of a climate researcher who provides advice on how to reduce energy use (by flying less, conserving home energy, and taking public transportation), as a function of that researcher’s personal carbon footprint description. Across the two studies, we randomly assigned participants to one of 18 vignettes about a climate scientist. We show that alleged large carbon footprints can greatly reduce the researcher’s credibility compared to low footprints. We also show that these differences in perceived credibility strongly affect participants’ reported intentions to change personal energy consumption. These effects are large, both for participants who believe climate change is important and for those who do not. Participants’ politics do affect their attitudes toward researchers, and have an extra effect on reported intentions to use public transportation (but not on intentions to fly less or conserve home energy). Credibility effects are similar for male and female climate scientists.
This book examines five rhetorical strategies used by the US coal industry to advance its interests in the face of growing economic and environmental pressures: industrial apocalyptic, corporate ventriloquism, technological shell game, hypocrite’s trap, and energy utopia. The authors argue that these strategies appeal to and reinforce neoliberalism, a discourse and set of practices that privilege market rationality and individual freedom and responsibility above all else. As the coal industry has become the leading target and leverage point for those seeking more aggressive action to mitigate climate change, their corporate advocacy may foreshadow rhetorical strategies available to other fossil fuel industries as they manage similar economic and cultural shifts. The authors’ analysis of coal’s corporate advocacy also identifies contradictions and points of vulnerability in the organized resistance to climate action as well as the larger ideological formation of neoliberalism.
This article provides a comparative discourse analysis of the climate responsibility narratives of Australian and Norwegian political leaders during the period 2007–2012. The analysis focuses on how political leaders imagine their country's identity and role in the world and how they connect (or disconnect) these identities, roles and interests with responsibility for climate change, and with their respective energy policies. The analysis shows that the striking differences in mitigation ambition and responsibility discourses between Australia and Norway are clearly related, but cannot be reduced, to differences in their relative dependence on fossil fuel. Rather, differences in national identity and international role conception provide a far more illuminating account than a simple interest‐based explanation. However, Australia and Norway are not quite so “poles apart” on their energy policies, and I briefly explore the implications of climate policy hypocrisy.
The conservative “echo chamber” is a crucial element of the climate change denial machine. Although social scientists have begun to examine the role of conservative media in the denial campaign, this article reports the first examination of conservative newspaper columnists. Syndicated columnists are very influential because they reach a large audience. We analyze 203 opinion editorials (“op-eds”) written by 80 different columnists published from 2007 to 2010, a period that saw a number of crucial events and policy proposals regarding climate change. We focus on the key topics the columnists address and the skeptical arguments they employ. The overall results reveal a highly dismissive view of climate change and critical stance toward climate science among these influential conservative pundits. They play a crucial role in amplifying the denial machine’s messages to a broad segment of the American public.
A theory of cyclical patterns in media coverage of environmental issues
must account for more than intrinsic qualities of the issues themselves:
Narrative factors must be considered. A content analysis of The New York
Times and The Washington Post stories from 1980 to 1995 shows how media
construct narratives about global warming and how these narratives may
influence attention cycles. Empirically the frequency of newspaper
coverage shows cyclical attention to global warming The content analysis
further reveals that implied danger and consequences of global warming
gain more prominence on the upswing of newspaper attention, whereas
controversy among scientists receives greater attention in the
maintenance phase. The economics of dealing with global warming also
receive greater attention during the maintenance and downside of the
attention cycle. The discussion offers a narrative explanation and
suggests the outcome of the ``master story{''} of global climate change
may discourage future attention. to global warming.
Focusing on the representation of climate change in the British "quality press," this article argues that the discursive (re)construction of scientific claims in the media is strongly entangled with ideological standpoints. Understood here as a set of ideas and values that legitimate a program of action vis-à-vis a given social and political order, ideology works as a powerful selection device in deciding what is scientific news, i.e. what the relevant "facts" are, and who are the authorized "agents of definition" of science matters. The representation of scientific knowledge has important implications for evaluating political programs and assessing the responsibility of both governments and the public in address-ing climate change.
Research has shown that the media are the main source of information and the main factor shaping people's awareness and concern in relation to climate change and therefore have an important role in setting the public agenda. As a key forum for the production, reproduction, and transformation of the meaning of public issues, the media influence understandings of risks, responsibilities, as well as the functioning of democratic politics. This article argues that the media also matter to citizens' perception of their (potential) political agency or their political subjectivity. Media representations construct particular ‘subject positions’ for individuals and cultivate dispositions to action or inaction. The article discusses the importance of citizens' political engagement with climate change and points out some aspects of media(ted) discourses that may constrain the perceived possibilities of participation in the politics of climate change. While engagement with climate change has multiple dimensions and a number of barriers have been identified through empirical studies, this article offers a critique of the role of the media in political engagement with the problem and suggests avenues for future research. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
Climate change is not ‘a problem’ waiting for ‘a solution’. It is an environmental, cultural and political phenomenon which is re-shaping the way we think about ourselves, our societies and humanity’s place on Earth. Drawing upon twenty-five years of professional work as an international climate change scientist and public commentator, Mike Hulme provides a unique insider’s account of the emergence of this phenomenon and the diverse ways in which it is understood. He uses different standpoints from science, economics, faith, psychology, communication, sociology, politics and development to explain why we disagree about climate change. In this way he shows that climate change, far from being simply an ‘issue’ or a ‘threat’, can act as a catalyst to revise our perception of our place in the world. Why We Disagree About Climate Change is an important contribution to the ongoing debate over climate change and its likely impact on our lives.
With rising public awareness of climate change, celebrities have become an increasingly important community of non nation-state ‘actors’ influencing discourse and action, thereby comprising an emergent climate science–policy–celebrity complex. Some feel that these amplified and prominent voices contribute to greater public understanding of climate change science, as well as potentially catalyze climate policy cooperation. However, critics posit that increased involvement from the entertainment industry has not served to influence substantive long-term advancements in these arenas; rather, it has instead reduced the politics of climate change to the domain of fashion and fad, devoid of political and public saliency. Through tracking media coverage in Australia, Canada, the United States, and United Kingdom, we map out the terrain of a ‘Politicized Celebrity System’ in attempts to cut through dualistic characterizations of celebrity involvement in politics. We develop a classification system of the various types of climate change celebrity activities, and situate movements in contemporary consumer- and spectacle-driven carbon-based society. Through these analyses, we place dynamic and contested interactions in a spatially and temporally-sensitive ‘Cultural Circuits of Climate Change Celebrities’ model. In so doing, first we explore how these newly ‘authorized’ speakers and ‘experts’ might open up spaces in the public sphere and the science/policy nexus through ‘celebritization’ effects. Second, we examine how the celebrity as the ‘heroic individual’ seeking ‘conspicuous redemption’ may focus climate change actions through individualist frames. Overall, this paper explores potential promises, pitfalls and contradictions of this increasingly entrenched set of ‘agents’ in the cultural politics of climate change. Thus, as a form of climate change action, we consider whether it is more effective to ‘plant’ celebrities instead of trees.
Towards a Cultural Politics of Climate Change provides a new perspective on how climate change matters in policy-making, business and everyday life. It argues that the work of low carbon transitions takes place through the creation of devices, the mobilisation of desires, and the articulation of dissent. Using case studies from the US, Australia, and Europe, the book examines the creation and contestation of new forms of cultural politics - of how a climate-changed society is articulated, realized and contested. Through this approach it opens up questions about how, where and by whom climate politics is conducted and the ways in which we might respond differently to this societal challenge. This book provides a key reference point for the emerging academic community working on the cultural politics of climate change, and a means through which to engage this new area of research with the broader social sciences.
Journalism and Climate Crisis: Public Engagement, Media Alternatives recognizes that climate change is more than an environmental crisis. It is also a question of political and communicative capacity. This book enquires into which approaches to journalism, as a particularly important form of public communication, can best enable humanity to productively address climate crisis. The book combines selective overviews of previous research, normative enquiry (what should journalism be doing?) and original empirical case studies of environmental communication and media coverage in Australia and Canada. Bringing together perspectives from the fields of environmental communication and journalism studies, the authors argue for forms of journalism that can encourage public engagement and mobilization to challenge the powerful interests vested in a high-carbon economy - 'facilitative' and 'radical' roles particularly well-suited to alternative media and alternative journalism. Ultimately, the book argues for a fundamental rethinking of relationships between journalism, publics, democracy and climate crisis. This book will interest researchers, students and activists in environmental politics, social movements and the media. © 2017 Robert A. Hackett, Susan Forde, Shane Gunster, Kerrie Foxwell-Norton. All rights reserved.
Journalism and Climate Crisis: Public Engagement, Media Alternatives recognizes that climate change is more than an environmental crisis. It is also a question of political and communicative capacity.
This book enquires into which approaches to journalism, as a particularly important form of public communication, can best enable humanity to productively address climate crisis. The book combines selective overviews of previous research, normative enquiry (what should journalism be doing?) and original empirical case studies of environmental communication and media coverage in Australia and Canada. Bringing together perspectives from the fields of environmental communication and journalism studies, the authors argue for forms of journalism that can encourage public engagement and mobilization to challenge the powerful interests vested in a high-carbon economy – ‘facilitative’ and ‘radical’ roles particularly well-suited to alternative media and alternative journalism. Ultimately, the book argues for a fundamental rethinking of relationships between journalism, publics, democracy and climate crisis.
This book will interest researchers, students and activists in environmental politics, social movements and the media.
An analysis of why people with knowledge about climate change often fail to translate that knowledge into action.
Global warming is the most significant environmental issue of our time, yet public response in Western nations has been meager. Why have so few taken any action? In Living in Denial, sociologist Kari Norgaard searches for answers to this question, drawing on interviews and ethnographic data from her study of "Bygdaby," the fictional name of an actual rural community in western Norway, during the unusually warm winter of 2000-2001.
In 2000-2001 the first snowfall came to Bygdaby two months later than usual; ice fishing was impossible; and the ski industry had to invest substantially in artificial snow-making. Stories in local and national newspapers linked the warm winter explicitly to global warming. Yet residents did not write letters to the editor, pressure politicians, or cut down on use of fossil fuels. Norgaard attributes this lack of response to the phenomenon of socially organized denial, by which information about climate science is known in the abstract but disconnected from political, social, and private life, and sees this as emblematic of how citizens of industrialized countries are responding to global warming.
Norgaard finds that for the highly educated and politically savvy residents of Bygdaby, global warming was both common knowledge and unimaginable. Norgaard traces this denial through multiple levels, from emotions to cultural norms to political economy. Her report from Bygdaby, supplemented by comparisons throughout the book to the United States, tells a larger story behind our paralysis in the face of today's alarming predictions from climate scientists.
Discourse theory is employed to analyse the public curriculum generated through the Camp for Climate Action. This movement emerged as a germinal response to tensions within the dominant discourse on ‘Climate Action’ by articulating it into a broader history of civil disobedience and staging spatial interventions that ostensibly identified the root causes of climate change. This generated learning opportunities over time for both activists and the wider public. However, this attempted redefinition of ‘Climate Action’ was threatened by coercive state action, which sought to link it with ‘domestic extremism’. Tensions emerged between ‘liberal’ and ‘radical’ participants as the meaning of ‘Climate Action’ once again became contested. The article concludes by exploring the implications of these tensions for the movement’s pedagogical efforts.
In a recent article in this journal, Lombard, Snyder-Duch, and Bracken (2002) surveyed 200 content analyses for their reporting of reliability tests, compared the virtues and drawbacks of five popular reliability measures, and proposed guidelines and standards for their use. Their discussion revealed that numerous misconceptions circulate in the content analysis literature regarding how these measures behave and can aid or deceive content analysts in their effort to ensure the reliability of their data. This article proposes three conditions for statistical measures to serve as indices of the reliability of data and examines the mathematical structure and the behavior of the five coefficients discussed by the authors, as well as two others. It compares common beliefs about these coefficients with what they actually do and concludes with alternative recommendations for testing reliability in content analysis and similar data-making efforts.
The public rely upon media representations to help interpret and make sense of the many complexities relating to climate science and governance. Media representations of climate issues – from news to entertainment – are powerful and important links between people’s everyday realities and experiences, and the ways in which they are discussed by scientists, policymakers and public actors. A dynamic mix of influences shapes what becomes climate ‘news’ or ‘information’. From internal workings of mass media such as journalistic norms, to external political, economic, cultural and social factors, this book helps students, academic researchers and interested members of the public explore how the media portrays influence. Providing a bridge between academic considerations and real-world developments, this book makes sense of media reporting on climate change as it explores ‘who speaks for the climate’ and what effects this may have on the spectrum of possible responses to modern climate challenges.
Environmental sustainability demands civic action through both changes in individual and community behaviors in addition to national and international agreements and cooperation. In moral appeals to the environment, individuals are often called upon to behave in “good” ways—reduce, reuse, recycle—to “save the planet.” Behavior, and our attitudes about it, is therefore an important component to ongoing sustainability efforts. This pilot study, conducted in Fall 2009, brings together research methods in sociolinguistics and rhetorical studies to examine the discourses that students produce when describing issues and practices concerning sustainability. In interviews with 15 students in an earth sustainability general education core, our study found that students were knowledgeable about environmental issues and expressed intentions to engage in sustainable behaviors. Yet, students produced accommodating discourses when addressing competing demands on their time and resources. The sociolinguistic analysis of interview data shows a disassociation from environmental issues at the symbolic level of language use. The rhetorical analysis shows that this disassociation manifests as guilt, largely because when choosing between various moral appeals in their social context, students are left without tangible direction for engaging in new sustainable behaviors.
This article analyzes an online discussion that followed an article published by UK environmental activist and journalist George Monbiot in The Guardian online newspaper. The analysis addresses the ways in which participants in an online forum debate responded to the tensions and contradictions between lifestyle, consumption, and sustainability highlighted in the original article. The discursive construction of class, green political orientations, and identities; visions of “the good life”; and appeals to religion and science are highlighted throughout the analysis—as are the discursive strategies for positioning self, other, and audience in the debate. The argument emphasizes the heterogeneity of discursive positioning and reflects on the role of social media in the politics of consumption and sustainability, especially given the inherent reflexivity of web forums as online communicative forms.
Since the 1970s, social scientists have argued that general pro-environmental attitudes have diffused throughout American society, rendering socio-demographics largely irrelevant in predicting support for such issues. The public reaction to the issue of climate change, however, is an exception to this narrative. While media bias, ideological framing, and business influence are often invoked to explain public apathy, I argue that ignoring class and culture in determining why climate change is so divisive is a potentially significant oversight. Using the cultural theory of Bourdieu, I examine how the conception of and reaction to climate change varies with economic and cultural capital using data from 40 interviews of Boston-area respondents. The results suggest that climate change may indeed be a ‘classed’ issue – both in how the respondents conceive of it in the first place, and how they speak of social class in the context of it. The results suggest that social scientists should go beyond rational-choice and media framing explanations, to take two prolific examples, in exploring how disagreements on the importance of climate change persist in the US.
The 2008 financial crisis has had an important, but neglected, impact on carbon market governance in the United States. It acted as a catalyst for the emergence of a domestic coalition that drew upon the crisis experience to demand stronger regulation over carbon markets. The influence of this coalition was seen first in the changing content of draft climate change bills between 2008 and 2010. But the coalition's more lasting legacy was its role in shaping the content of, and supporting, the passage of the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (the Dodd–Frank bill) in July 2010. Although that bill was aimed primarily at bolstering financial stability, its derivatives provisions strengthened carbon market regulation in significant ways. This policy episode demonstrates new patterns of coalition building in carbon market politics as well as the growing links between climate governance and financial regulatory politics. At the same time, the significance of these developments should not be overstated because of various limitations in the content and implementation of the Dodd–Frank bill, as well as the waning support for carbon markets more generally within the US since the bill's passage.
Our dependence on energy from fossil fuels is causing potentially disastrous global warming and posing fundamental questions about the commensurability of consumer capitalism and a sustainable society. UK and Scottish governments have taken a lead in climate change legislation intended to avoid worst-case scenarios through low carbon transition. There are, however, considerable uncertainties about whether individualized, market-driven, materialistic societies can manage such radical transformations. Policies to cut household emissions focus on behaviour change through social marketing and incremental modifications to consumption. This technocratic model produces very little societal change, and seems likely to be self-defeating. The framing of the problem as one of behavioural adjustments to individual self-interest obscures alternative understandings of society as a collective accomplishment. Through simultaneous ‘knowing and not knowing’ about unsustainable consumerism, a behavioural model allows governing to proceed, while marginalizing awkward questions about the contradictions between economic growth and low carbon transitions.
This article provides a comparative analysis of adversarial framing oriented to reputation discrediting in the context of social movement/counter-movement relations. Website material associated with two Canadian organizations, the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (NRSP) and DeSmogBlog (DSB), involved on opposite sides of the contention over anthropogenic global warming (AGW), is analysed to examine how each side identifies and frames its adversaries and the latter's claims-making practices. The analysis focuses on the extent to which the structure of adversarial framing by each side differs from or is mirrored by the framing of the other side. Both sides discredit their opponents on the basis of five reputational dimensions: practices, moral character, competence and qualifications, social associations, and real versus apparent motivations. The principal point of difference concerns the main focus of discrediting, with the NRSP focusing chiefly on its opponents' claims-making practices and the DSB on moral character. Both discourses, nonetheless, create an integrated discrediting narrative in which all five dimensions are involved, with motivation acting as a cognitive and normative thread tying the other dimensions together.
Copenhagen 2009 was a major moment in the development of climate change as an issue. But climate sceptics before and during this event, sought to influence the nature of debate, and for this reason, the way Copenhagen was covered in the mass media was particularly important. This paper outlines the contours of contrarian arguments and claims, and assesses their reflection in the coverage at Copenhagen. The focus is on television, and extends to the assessment of internet – both modes of mass communication underrepresented in the existing literature. The results suggest a higher profile for contrarians and scepticism than is perhaps healthy, and speak to the role of these mass media, now and in the future, particularly with regard to the issue of public comprehension of the issues involved.
This article examines the role of letters to the editor in advancing and sustaining non-standard narratives about climate change in the print media. The letters page is a unique section of the newspaper that is subject to distinct functional and normative pressures. It is also a place where standard media norms are weakest and non-journalistic narratives have an opportunity to leak in. Using research into climate change coverage in eight major Canadian dailies in 2007-2008, the article employs content analysis and critical discourse analysis to examine how letters advance fringe arguments into the print media landscape that would not stand up to regular journalistic scrutiny. While these arguments come from all sides of the issue, it is argued that letters are particularly important for establishing and legitimizing conservative-skeptical perspectives on climate change.
This article reviews existing research on the portrayal of climate change within the print media, paying particular attention to the increasing role that celebrities have come to play within popular culture. While this is certainly not a new development, celebrities are increasingly appearing as key voices within the climate change debate, providing a powerful news hook and potential mobilizing agent. Early coverage of climate change was dominated by scientific sources, but as the debate became more institutionalized and politicized a wider variety of competing sources entered the news arena. Yet media prominence is not necessarily a reliable indicator of influence. How issues are framed is of crucial importance and celebrity interventions can be a double‐edged sword. WIREs Clim Change 2011 2 535–546 DOI: 10.1002/wcc.119
This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Communication
Internet discussion forums and other forms of virtual social networking media are increasingly being used as sites of discursive practice. Quite apart from the research opportunities offered by conventional forms of Internet research (such as surveys and polls), discussion forums (alongside Web-logs and social networking sites) arguably provide new opportunities for social researchers to gather data in this very particular, but nonetheless popular cultural context. This paper explores the phenomenon through the large amount of textual data generated from an article on climate change and sustainable lifestyles in the Guardian newspaper. The discourses that emerged in reaction to this article provide valuable insights into the social construction of climate change and sustainable lifestyles, demonstrating conflicting arguments relating to the acceptance of climate change as a human-induced phenomenon, the reliability of data used to assert arguments concerning global warming and the contested views expressed over the value of adopting more sustainable lifestyles. Further, the paper argues that environmental social scientists need to become aware of the potential for analysing virtual discussion forums and social networking sites as valuable data sources for their research, recognising that these represent both cultural artefacts in their own right and alternative sites of discursive practice for anonymous and immediate everyday talk.
In a recent article in this journal, Lombard, Snyder-Duch, and Bracken (2002) surveyed 200 content analyses for their reporting of reliability tests, compared the virtues and drawbacks of five popular reliability measures, and proposed guidelines and standards for their use. Their discussion revealed that numerous misconceptions circulate in the content analysis literature regarding how these measures behave and can aid or deceive content analysts in their effort to ensure the reliability of their data. This article proposes three conditions for statistical measures to serve as indices of the reliability of data and examines the mathematical structure and the behavior of the five coefficients discussed by the authors, as well as two others. It compares common beliefs about these coefficients with what they actually do and concludes with alternative recommendations for testing reliability in content analysis and similar data-making efforts.
Using the framework of social representations theory--more precisely the concepts of anchoring and objectification--this article analyses the emotions on which the media reporting on climate change draws. Emotions are thereby regarded as discursive phenomena. A qualitative analysis of two series in Swedish media on climate change, one in a tabloid newspaper and one in public service television news, is presented showing how the verbal and visual representations are attached to emotions of fear, hope, guilt, compassion and nostalgia. It is further argued that emotional representations of climate change may on the one hand enhance public engagement in the issue, but on the other hand may draw attention away from climate change as the abstract, long-term phenomenon of a statistical character that it is.
Sumario: The new environmental conflict -- Discourse analysis -- The historical roots of ecological modernization -- Accumulating knowledge, accumulating pollution?. Ecological modernization in the United Kingdom -- The micro-powers of apocalypse: ecological modernization in the Netherlands -- Ecological modernization: discourse and institutional change Bibliografía: P. 297-318
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Don’t even think about it: Why our brains are wired to ignore climate change
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Study: “Climate scientists are more credible when they practice what they preach” - but my aerial surveys show many don’t. Watts Up With That
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Watts, A. (2016, June 16). Study: "Climate scientists are more credible when they practice what they preach" -but my
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People don’t trust hypocritical climate scientists, study finds
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