Climate Change Discourse in Tabloid and Broadsheet Newspapers: A Critical Ecolinguistic Analysis

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Climate Change Discourse in Tabloid and Broadsheet Newspap ers: A Critical Ecolinguistic Analysis

Dana Zoutman| University College Roosevelt

In partial fulfilment of the requirements for AH-LING303 Language and Society taught by Dr. Ernestine Lahey

Abstract

Newspapers constitute a revealing part of public discourse because of their large readerships and their diverging portrayal of values. Thus, scholars from a variety of disciplines have studied climate change discourse as communicated by mass media outlets such as newspapers. However, an often-overlooked aspect of newspapers in these studies is the distinctive socioeconomic groups which comprise the readership of broadsheet and tabloid newspapers. Therefore, this paper focuses on a (eco)linguistic approach to discursive strategies concerning climate change and aims to illustrate the distinctive discourses that are communicated by broadsheet and tabloid newspapers, with consideration of the potential influences on their readerships concerning audience design and accommodation theory. Through the use of corpus-informed Critical Discourse analysis with the online SiBol corpus, discourse on ”climate change” and ”global warming” in UK-based prestige and popular press in 2013 was analyzed. The results reveal that climate change discourse indeed varies between the two corpora and supports the aim of this paper to provide a preliminary exploration of what is currently still an understudied part of discourse.

Introduction

Newspapers comprise an important part of public discourse, as they are a major contributor to the reader’s understanding of current events and play a large role in helping them create a normative view of the world beyond their everyday lives (Conboy 12). The construction of news is not neutral or objective; news outlets construct a highly mediated version of reality (Lester 63), are selectively representative (Fairclough 17), and often project values related to their expected readership (Richardson 94). These news values vary between different newspapers, illustrated by Boykoff, who states that ”UK daily news readership is distinctly marked by varied socio-economic demographics” (552a). In regard to this, one of the clearest socio-economic divisions in readership is between prestige (”broadsheet”) and popular (”tabloid”) newspapers (Boykoff, see appendix 1). Furthermore, news outlets have an interesting relationship with their readership; they contribute to the shaping of the reader’s world view and understanding of public issues, whilst simultaneously being shaped by the values and ideas of their readers (Bell 110). All these properties make this type of media discourse a suitable and potentially revealing case for sociolinguistic research and Critical Discourse Analysis. Climate change has been a topic of discussion in newspapers with an increasing frequency over the last few decades (Boykoff and Roberts 36). Thus, climate change has become subject to news values that are shaping (as well as shaped by) the reader’s understanding of environmental issues. The Guardian exemplified this concern in May 2019, when their style guide was updated with the recommendation for writers to use terms such as ”climate crisis” and ”global heating” when addressing environmental concerns (Carrington). News media communication regarding climate change and the environment has received much attention from fields such as environmental sociology (Ulrich, Smith, Anderson, Beder) and environmental communication and media studies (Boykoff, Carvalho, Lester, Conboy), but similar considerations have only recently started to en-

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Dana Zoutman | Climate Change Discourse in Tabloid and Broadsheet Newspapers

ter the field of linguistics. A subdiscipline where linguistic choices in regard to environmental issues have been a central concern is ecolinguistics. Stibbe, an influential ecolinguist, states that our perception of ecological issues are shaped through discourse (or ”stories”) that surround us every day, such as news reports (5). Whilst this shows that ecolinguists have studied news discourse, research thus far has mainly focused on prestige press (Bell, Norton and Hulme), whereas linguistic analysis of popular press as well as comparisons between these two types of media remain largely unconsidered. In order to shed light on climate change discourse in prestige and popular press, this paper will apply Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), as developed by Fairclough, to UK broadsheet and tabloid data supported by an analysis of the relevant sub corpora in the SiBol online corpus. The aim of this research is to outline some of the linguistic differences regarding climate change discourse in broadsheet and tabloid articles published in the UK in 2013, and to illustrate the necessity for further linguistic research in this field in order to establish the ”stories” that are presented to different socioeconomic classes. First, all relevant previous research has been outlined and critically reviewed to illustrate what has been done and what still needs to be done. Afterwards, a preliminary analysis concerning some of the differences between prestige and popular forms is explained and subsequently performed. Finally, the outlined previous research and the exploratory analysis provided in this paper are gathered and brought together in the conclusion.

Literature Review

The coverage of climate change topics in newspapers has been studied from various angles in recent scholarly research. However, most of this research has come from disciplines such as sociology, communication studies and journalism studies rather than from linguistics. Among the researchers interested in this topic, Maxwell T. Boykoff and Anabela Carvalho might be considered central figures. Carvalho, a communication scientist, has focused on the variation between three UK broadsheet newspapers. As they all offer a different political stance, she looked at their different stances towards the environment (226). In like manner, Boykoff has done extensive research on UK media representations of climate change. However, contrary to Carvalho, his research has primarily focused on UK tabloids (Boykoff, Boykoff and Mansfield). He states that ”while working-class segments of the population have been of secondary importance in science-policy analyses, examinations such as these need to take on a more central role: these citizens are differentially impacted by ‘modern global climate change’, and are potentially critical contributors to calls for improved climate policy governance” (Boykoff 567a). Furthermore, whilst Carvalho and Boykoff ’s interests most closely align with cultural politics and communication studies, their research does relate to linguistics as they examine discursive frames in UK newsletters with the aid of Critical Discourse Analysis. However, the linguistic analysis presented in their research is limited, as their definition of discursive practices appears less concerned with linguistic features throughout the texts and their textual analyses only lead to the identification of general frames. Carvalho and Boykoff only focus on either prestige or popular forms, whereas a comparison between both formats would have been potentially more revealing. Furthermore, such a comparative study would have also been more representative of what stories are received by different socio-economic groups, as Conboy emphasizes in his work Language of the News when he stated that the language in both types of news ”has an enormous influence on the ways in which we perceive the world in which we live” (4). Boykoff does address the importance of this difference by providing a table of the socio-economic class of the readerships of various broadsheet and tabloid forms in the UK which clearly illustrates the divide between prestige and popular news: whereas The Times, Guardian, Telegraph and Independent all have the majority (around 60%) of their readership in the A/B class, it was found that only a little over 10% of the readership of tabloids such as The Sun and Daily Mirror belonged to the A/B class (see appendix). Thus, whilst a shifted focus on the discourse in tabloids was indeed important, any conclusions about the ways in which environmental issues are framed differently from broadsheet newspapers would require a comparative analysis. The relationship between newspapers and their (imagined) authors has been thoroughly studied by the sociologist Allan Bell in his work The Language of News Media. In his work, he finds that ”beliefs and stereotypes about recipients and their speech patterns are the sole practical input to mass communicators’ linguistic output. [...] In doing so they are aware of social groups rather than individuals,” (90) and introduces the idea that media communicators and their (assumed) readerships do, despite the indirect nature of their communication, undergo a type of accommodation. Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) refers to a framework which is used in order to explain the ways participants adjust their communication strategies to indicate their attitudes towards one another (Giles & Olgay 326). Furthermore, Giles and Olgay point out that CAT is indeed not restricted to direct exchanges, and that accom-

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modation tendencies also prevail through ”mediated” communication (338). Due to this audience design, as Bell calls it, he found that newspapers are grouped correspondent to the socioeconomic groups that comprise their readership (108). This became apparent through his research of audience design and determiner deletion in UK newspapers, where he found that the percentage of determiner deletion was closely related to the socioeconomic classes of the readership of each newspaper: prestige newspapers only show determiner deletion up to 12 percent, whereas the lowest deletion found among popular newspapers was 79 percent (108). Furthermore, in newspapers their discursive strategies do not only differ grammatically. Whilst often represented as objective sources of information, news is in fact not value-free and the discursive strategies show ideological distinctions (Fowler 4). Caldas-Coulthard and Moon illustrate this in their research focused on differences in gender categorizations and the stances towards them between broadsheet and tabloid media, through corpus linguistic analysis. Their findings further emphasize the significant amount of difference between the ”the views of the world prepared for tabloid readers and those offered to readers of the broadsheets” (124). However, whilst the theory as mentioned above does suggest the accuracy of this paper, a clear limitation of this study was that the corpus that CaldasCoulthard and Moon utilized (Bank of English) only included data from one tabloid newspaper, The Sun, and further investigation with other popular press data would be necessary to draw conclusions about tabloids in general. An interesting linguistic analysis regarding the representation of nature in the media was done by Goatly, who created a corpus of BBC World Service discourse and through his application of Systemic Functional Grammar found that nature tends to assume a passive role throughout his corpus. Through this analysis, he attempts to show that consistent linguistic features such as those in his findings might have an effect on the cognition of language according to the Whorfian hypothesis (25). However, his findings rely on the assumption that the BBC World Service provides an unbiased source of information and does not account for any possible framing such as due to the ”elite” status (4) of the BBC World Service or the socio-economic class of its audience. In contrast, Norton and Hulme do provide an ecolinguistic examination of multiple UK newsletters. They identified four ”stories” that are prevalent in regard to climate change reporting: the lukewarmer, ecoactivist, smart growth reformer, and the ecomodernist story (116). However, the linguistic evidence that is provided for these claims is limited and they do not go beyond stating their findings and fail to clearly illustrate any linguistic analysis that led to their conclusions. Thus, the linguistic coverage of environmental communication in newspapers remains insufficient and exposes the necessity for further research. Finally, before demonstrating the methodology of CDA as it is applied in this paper, it is necessary to establish its sociolinguistic framework. Critical Discourse Analysis is a form of analysis that was developed by Norman Fairclough with the aim of uncovering the ways in which linguistic discourse, which he considers a form of social practice, ”both constitutes the social world and is constituted by other social practices” (Jørgensen and Philips 61). CDA argues that discursive practices contribute to the formation and conservation of unequal power relations between social groups. It has been applied to discursive practices such as those relating to gender (e.g. Caldas-Coulthard & Moon), ethnicities (e.g. Baker et al.), and recently ecolinguists have also started applying it to discursive practices related to ecological contexts. Ecolinguistics, as applied by the aforementioned research of Norton and Hulme, is a subdiscipline of linguistics which is primarily concerned with the construction of the environment and the discourse surrounding ecological matters that structure and influence the stances taken regarding environmental issues. Stibbe, perhaps ecolinguistics’ central figure, has already been discussed in the introduction of this paper. His ”stories” approach has shaped much of the current ecolinguistic research (e.g. Norton and Hulme,), and he has advocated for the application of CDA. Whilst ecolinguistics often presents itself as an angle which differs from sociolinguistics, it could be argued to be part of the field of sociolinguistics due to its concern with socially constructed (in this case: regarding the environment) discourse and its frequent application of CDA. A linguist who is also associated with linguistic ”stories” such as those that Stibbe refers to is George Lakoff. Known for his work Metaphors We Live By, in his article ”Why it Matters How We Frame the Environment” he examines the cognitive framing that is currently often applied to environmental discourse. In it, he states that ”the facts, to be communicated, must be framed properly” (73). This, in his view, is not currently the case for global warming and environmental action. Another influential linguist who has stated similar beliefs regarding environmental communication is M.A.K. Halliday. He was one of the first linguists to emphasize the importance of bringing attention to the ways in which grammar promotes ”the ideology of growth, or growthism” and related this to the unbounded nature of resources as presented by grammar (Halliday in Fill and Mulhauser, 196). Returning to CDA, this framework does not necessarily indicate any specific methodology, but rather provides

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Dana Zoutman | Climate Change Discourse in Tabloid and Broadsheet Newspapers

a critical perspective through consideration of linguistic features on various different levels of language and their influence on social practices (Baker et al. 273). Recently, CDA has been combined with corpus strategies in various studies. An example of such research was presented by Baker et al., who analyzed a 40-million-word corpus of news articles about refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants (273) and aimed to provide a framework for future research which adopts corpus approaches to CDA.

Methodology

This paper combines corpus-informed CDA with previous research to analyze the different stance-taking in regard to discourse on ”climate change” and ”global warming” in prestige and popular press, and its potential influences on their readerships considering audience design and accommodation theory. In order to collect the necessary data, the online SiBol corpus was accessed via SketchEngine. The SiBol corpus is also referred to as the English Broadsheet Newspapers corpus and contains data from newspapers between 1993 and 2013 amounting to 650-million words in over 1.5 million articles. With the most recent update of the corpus, SiBol 13, data from the UK tabloids Daily Mail and Daily Mirror from the year 2013 was added to the corpus. Within the SiBol corpus, I created two sub-corpora: UK broadsheets in 2013 (122,407,369 tokens in total) and UK tabloids in 2013 (37,530,733 tokens in total). Using these corpora, concordance searches for ”climate change” and ”global warming” were produced (see table 1 and 2). ”Climate change” in the UK broadsheet corpus resulted in 2,992 concordance lines, and 405 in the UK tabloid corpus. Additionally, ”global warming” resulted in 670 hits for prestige press and a mere 155 lines for popular press. Furthermore, collocation patterns were gathered and analyzed.

Left Context KWIC Right Context 1 global outcomes on issues ranging from climate change and world trade to Middle East peace 2 more evident than on the subject of climate climate change a topic of immeasurable significance 3 has ever had to present to the public? What climate change a topic of immeasurable significance 4 protecting our planet from the harmful effects of climate change a topic of immeasurable significance 5 at the top table still thought they could master climate change a topic of immeasurable significance 6 are rising so fast. Our leaders now treat climate change a topic of immeasurable significance 7 Osborne has done the same thing to the UK’s climate change a topic of immeasurable significance 8 In the US, 80% of people polled now say that climate change a topic of immeasurable significance Table 1. Concordance lines with ”climate change” in Broadsheet 2013 sub-corpus.

Left Context KWIC Right Context 9 in the case of global warming most of those millions aren’t even born yet. 10 in a cosmic equivalent of Grant Theft Auto. global warming , as the deniers persist in arguing, would indeed 11 miss their target of no more than 2C of global warming this Century. Instead we’re on track for 12 increased flooding as the greatest threat posed by global warming in the UK, and 2012 bore this out: 13 a rethink among scientists about the impact of global warming , according to Arnell, who says earlier, simpler 14 climate this century is already in the atmosphere. global warming will lead to further warming, though several 15 We need to accept that increased global warming is inevitable and plan on that basis. 16 the government’s own scientists concluding that global warming is increasing the risk of flooding, the coalition cut

Table 2. Concordance lines with ”global warming” in Broadsheet 2013 sub-corpus.

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Left Context KWIC Right Context 17 the Met Office has revised its predictions global warming whispering that new data suggest there will be 18 known for ages: there is no evidence that global warming is happening. The Met Office quietly readjusted 19 predictions they’ve been making about man-made global warming these past 20 years have started to come crashing 20 computer models were in no doubt: man-made global warming was a very real threat 21 In other words: Never mind that global warming stopped in 1997. It will come back 22 the fanatical believer in the great global warming religion, who was also responsible 23 an article of faith that not only was man-made global warming real and dangerous, but it was the primary 24 They froze me out, because I don’t believe in global warming My career dried up.

Table 3. Concordance lines with ”global warming” in Tabloid 2013 sub-corpus.

Left Context KWIC Right Context 25 been seized on by sceptics of man-made climate change who claim that global warming has flatlined 26 short-term forecasts had improved, but their climate change analysis was poor’ 27 burying bad news - that they have got their climate change forecast wrong 28 This paper keeps an open mind on climate change - and accepts that the Met Office’s revised 29 THE CRAZY climate change OBSESSION THAT’S MADE THE MET 30 has acted as Britain’s foremost cheerleader for climate change alarmism 31 In 2007, its Hadley Centre for climate change research produced a briefing document for 32 an expert from the Intergovernmental Panel for climate change M(IPCC) in the document. Table 4. Concordance lines with ”climate change” in Tabloid 2013 sub-corpus.

Analysis

C oncordance Lines

The concordance lines from UK broadsheets in 2013 and UK tabloids in 2013 already illustrate certain discursive differences. Perhaps the most striking of these is the contrast in tenor between these outlets: whereas UK broadsheets call upon scientific and political discourse associations through lexical choices such as ”a topic of immeasurable significance” and ”increasing the risk of flooding”, the UK tabloids align their discourses more closely with opinion pieces through lexical choices such as ”the fanatical believer in the great global warming religion” and ”the crazy climate change obsession”. This is in line with the findings of Boykoff and Mansfield, who illustrated that the main three differences between tabloids and broadsheets are in their use of tenor, breadth and depth (2). Breadth and depth, whilst less apparent and certainly harder to truly analyze from concordance lines without the rest of the articles provided, should also be considered. From the concordance lines of the UK tabloid sub corpus, two important framing strategies come forward: those with a contrarian or denialist perspective, as well as (the fallacy of ) balanced coverage. Balanced reporting refers to the concept of providing an objective central perspective that considers all sides of an issue in journalism. Whereas this certainly can provide accurate depictions and considerations for many issues, Boykoff points out that in regard to climate change reports, this ”may instead perpetrate information bias regarding scientific opinions” (470b). As a large consensus in regard to environmental sciences and the climate crisis has been established, balanced coverages considering those scientists as well as the few outliers provide an unbalanced picture of the reality and instead give a much larger voice to those who are not in agreement with the consensus. Many of the concordance lines of the tabloid corpus indicate other perspectives than that of man-made climate change (lines 17, 18, 19, 22, 24, 25, 27, and 29). Some of these lines do not only express doubts and divergent perspectives towards climate change but go further and assume a so-called contrarian or denialist perspective. Line 18 explicitly states that ”there is no evidence that global warming is happening” and line 24 outlines the author’s experience as somebody who does not believe in global warming. The broadsheet concordance lines firmly contrast this, with the only mention of a contrarian perspective being line 10: ”Global warming, as the deniers persist in arguing”. Furthermore, whereas the perspective adopted in the contrarian lines of tabloids often aligned with that of the climate denier, line 10 explicitly uses the word ”denier” to indicate the claims are made by another group than the group to which the author belongs.

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Dana Zoutman | Climate Change Discourse in Tabloid and Broadsheet Newspapers

Defining Climate Change and Global Warming

Thus far, the terms ”climate change” and ”global warming” have been used interchangeably. However, a search for collocates in SketchEngine revealed that, while ”climate change” does indeed appear with similar contexts, ”global warming” in tabloids suggests that the use of this phrase in tabloids might be more closely related to the aforementioned contrarian frame, through modifiers such as ”myth” and ”alleged” (see table 5). A possible explanation for this is presented in Whitmarsh’ research regarding public understanding of the terms ”climate change” and ”global warming”, where she finds that ”global warming” tended to be more closely associated with human causes, whereas ”climate change” was often thought of in terms of natural causes. Furthermore, she points out that “’global warming’ suggests a clear direction of change towards increasing temperatures; while the implications of ’“climate change’” are more ambiguous” (416). It should be noted that a clear limitation of the information provided in this search for collocates, is that MI-scores could not be accessed. Whereas this might appear to contrast with the findings in table 5, it is important to keep in mind that many of the tabloid’s considerations regarding global warming concerned a contrarian framework. Thus, if global warming is more closely related to human activity, the use of such modifiers would strengthen their stancetaking by weakening claims regarding global warming with modifiers such as ”myth” and ”alleged”.

”Climate Change” ”Global Warming”

Broadsheet Tabloid Broadsheet Tabloid

man-made man-made man-made man-made anthropogenic myth catastrophic anticipated human induced alleged dangerous global

Table 5. Collocation (modifiers) results.

W hat Corpora (Cannot) Tell You

Richardson states that ”it is also important to recognize that textual or journalistic meaning is communicated as much by absence as by presence; as much by what is ‘missing’ or excluded as by what is remembered and present” (93). Thus far, I have not addressed one of the largest weaknesses of this paper: the considerable lack of results in regard to climate change and global warming, especially in the popular press: only 405 tokens for ”climate change” and 155 for ”global warming”. Considering this Tabloid corpus consists of 37,530,733 tokens; this is significantly low. Corpora cannot give you information about what is not said, however, they might be able to tell you something about what has been said perhaps too infrequently. While Boykoff and Mansfield state that climate change coverage has increased dramatically in recent times (3), this increased amount of coverage is still rather limited in comparison to broadsheets.

Conclusion

In order to outline some of the linguistic differences regarding climate change discourse between broadsheet and tabloid newspapers, this paper has presented a critical overview of relevant research as well as a (preliminary) corpus analysis which looked at the use of ”climate change” and ”global warming” in sub-corpora in the SiBol corpus. The results reveal that climate change discourse indeed varies between the two corpora and supports the aim of this paper to provide a preliminary exploration of what is currently still an understudied part of discourse. Furthermore, through elaborate examination of research in other disciplines as well as relevant linguistic studies, this paper has argued that these results are incredibly relevant to sociolinguistics due to

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the divided socio-economic statuses of the readerships associated with these two separate forms of news. The clear framing differences between tabloids and broadsheets thus can be seen as both a mirror of the stances their audience’s take towards climate change and the main flow of information that these audiences are exposed to in regard to climate change. Thus, different socio-economic classes in the UK are currently presented with considerably divergent frames of reference regarding environmental issues. A limitation of this research paper was the corpus information accessible through SketchEngine, as MI-scores could not be obtained for this study. Furthermore, this paper was limited in resources and time, amounting in the use of an online corpus with only a small amount of relevant data, and thus future research in sociolinguistics and ecolinguistics is necessary in order illustrate that different ”stories” about our environment are presented in prestige and popular newspapers.Beyond this particular framework, other potentially revealing future studies in this field could consider the political ideologies of different newspapers or variations between different regional newspapers and how this relates to climate change discourse.

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Appendix

Newspaper Socio-economic distribution of readership (NRS social grade: %)

The Sun (and News of the World) A/B: 11 C1/C2: 56 D/E: 32

The Daily Mail (and Sunday Mail) A/B: 31 C1/C2: 55 D/E: 15

Daily Mirror (and Sunday Mirror) A/B: 13 C1/C2: 56 D/E: 30 Daily Telegraph (and Sunday Telegraph) A/B: 59 C1/C2: 35 D/E: 6

Daily Express (and Sunday Express) A/B: 25 C1/C2: 57 D/E: 18

The Times (and Sunday Times) A/B: 63 C1/C2: 34 D/E: 3

The Guardian (and Observer)

A/B: 61 C1/C2: 33 D/E: 6 The Independent (and Sunday Independent) A/B: 57 C1/C2: 40 D/E: 3 Appendix 1. Socio-economic distribution of readership. Accessed via Boykoff (a, 2008), p. 552.

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