A Critical Discourse Study on the Representation of Climate Change in the BBC and Al Jazeera News Coverage 2021–2023

This study sheds light on how people are represented in the news coverage of climate change in two major news media outlets, BBC and Al Jazeera, during 2021-2023. This study is theoretically anchored in Critical Discourse Analysis and the ultimate aim is to uncover ideologies related to the positioning of people in the news coverage of climate change in the two online media platforms. The textual analysis uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods for text analysis to examine the study object. First, quantitative tools were used as an entry point into the data, which helped identify ‘people’ as an important content category. In order to study the representation of people, the categories of age group and living conditions were created inductively in the data processing. Furthermore, transitivity analysis was used to explore the processes that people are involved in. The findings reveal that both news media outlets portray people participants as vulnerable and disempowered in different ways. The BBC was found to portray people participants as Actors in negated Material processes where they fail to act or in Mental processes where they experience negative emotions such as climate anxiety. In contrast, the people participants in Al Jazeera were represented as vulnerable primarily due to their practical living conditions, and they mostly performed the role as Goal in Material processes. In addition, the analysis revealed a tendency, in particular in Al Jazeera’s news coverage, to represent people participants in aggregated form, emphasizing their disastrous situation. Given that people’s worldviews can be influenced by media representations, it is noteworthy that both these two major news media outlets cast people participants in this helpless and passivizing light, which could have implications for how news readers see themselves in the face of climate change.