Climate emergency in the Portuguese Parliament and in the media: a discursive approach

The environment is ubiquitous in discourses of the public sphere in modern societies. Public discussions on this issue take place in parliaments, in scientific and activist forums, etc., and among policy-makers, but the media recontextualise the political discourse and try to influence political decisions. This paper focuses on environmental discourse, analysing the media treatment of the declaration of a climate emergency requested by some political parties in the Portuguese Parliament, in three Portuguese newspapers between 9 and 18 May 2019. It then compares this media treatment of the issue with a recent newspaper opinion article. The study adopts a discursive approach, aiming to identify the lexical transfer between the specialized discourse and the discourse of dissemination to the lay people, the modalisation operated by the journalist/mediator, the selection of the voices evoked, the articles’ didacticity and some of the rhetorical strategies adopted to persuade the reader.