A review of the above titled paper by Hugh
Doulton, Katrina Brown.
Climate change is, rightly or wrongly,
still a contested issue in all its dimensions—scientific, political, economic
and social (Carvalho, 2003). The mass media is a critical arena for this
debate, and an important source of climate change information for the public. The
science of climate change is full of uncertainty, however, the greater
vulnerability of poor countries to the impacts of climate change is one aspect
that is widely acknowledged.
The paper adapts Dryzek’s (2005)
‘components’ approach to discourse analysis to explore the media construction
of climate change and development in UK ‘quality’ newspapers between 1997 and
2007. Eight discourses are identified from more than 150 articles, based on the
entities recognised, assumptions about natural relationships, agents and their
motives, rhetorical devices and normative judgements. They show a wide range of
opinions regarding the impacts of climate change on development and the
appropriate action to be taken.
The term ‘discourse’ has many definitions;
here it is understood as ‘a shared meaning of a phenomenon’ (Adger et al.,
2001).
Discourses concerned with likely severe impacts
have dominated coverage in the Guardian and the Independent since 1997, and in
all four papers since 2006. Previously discourses proposing that climate change
was a low development priority had formed the coverage in the Times and the
Telegraph.
The classification of different discourses
allows an inductive, nuanced analysis of the factors influencing representation
of climate change and development issues; an analysis which highlights the role
of key events, individual actors, newspaper ideology and wider social and
political factors. Table 1 below gives a summary of the 8 different discourses.
(Click on the table for a better look, both images contribute to the same table). The table displays how they are distinguished and how they
are constructed through the basic entities recognized; the assumptions about
natural relationships; the agents; metaphors and rhetorical devices; and
normative judgments. The sources of authority range from climate/skeptical
science, to NGOs and individuals.
 |
| Table 1. |
Authors have shown that the media
frequently fails to convey scientific uncertainty regarding climate change
accurately, tending to sensationalism and increased certainty, despite major inherent
uncertainty in climate predictions (Ladle et al., 2005).
In all the discourses other than optimism and self-righteous mitigation (table 2.), developing countries are
portrayed as needing the help of the developed world if they are to deal with
the impacts of climate change. There is little discussion of poor people in
dealing with the impacts of climate change, nor the complex interplay of
factors that will influence the vulnerability and adaption to climate change (Adger
et. al., 2003). Only ‘disaster strikes’ gives
any voice to poor people, as well as barely any differentiation of the varied
developing world itself.
Thus the overall the findings demonstrate
media perceptions of a rising sense of an impending catastrophe for the
developing world that is defenseless without the help of the West, perpetuating
to an extent views of the poor as victims.
References
Adger, W.N., Huq, S., Brown, K., Conway,
D., Hulme, M., (2003). Adaptation to climate change in the developing world.
Progress in Development Studies 3 (3), 179.
Carvalho, A. (2003). Reading the papers:
ideological cultures and media discourses on scientific knowledge. Paper
presented at a conference entitled Does Discourse Matter? Discourse Power and
Institutions in the Sustainability Transition, Hamburg, Germany, pp.11-13.
Dryzek, J.S. (2005). The Politics of the
Earth: Environmental Discourses. Oxford University Press.
Ladle, R.J., Jepson, P., Whittaker, R.J.,
2005. Scientists and the media: the struggle for legitimacy in climate change
and conservation science. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 30 (3), 231–240.
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