A critical discourse analysis of power relations in the newspapers’ (re)construction of global climate conferences

ical discourse studies on climate change can be categorized into
qualitative, quantitative, and corpus-assisted CDA. The qualitative studies are further
grouped into frame analysis (Trumbo, 1996; Weingart et al., 2000; Carvalho and Burgess,
2005; Carvalho, 2007; Hulme, 2007; Boykoff, 2008; Olausson, 2009), ‘component
approach to discourse analysis’ (Dryzek, 2005; Doulton and Brown, 2009), representation
analysis (Boykoff, 2008; Carvalho and Pereira, 2008; Ferlini and Cruz-Mena in Carvalho
and Pereira, 2008; Wodak and Meyer, 2012), metaphor analysis (Moser and Dilling, 2007;
Nerlich et al., 2011), semiotics analysis (Linder, 2006), etc. The quantitative studies are
mainly those by Boykoff and Boykoff (2004, 2007). Finally, the corpus-assisted CDA
studies include Wang (2009), Eskjaer (2009), Grundmann and Krishnamurthy (2010),
Caillaud et al. (2012), Koteyko et al. (2013), etc. All these studies have advanced our
knowledge about media discourse on climate change in important ways. However, there
is very little concern on how power relations at international climate conferences are
(re)constructed in the media. This study, therefore, sought to fill the gap in literature
by investigating the power relations among nations as conveyed via the influential
newspapers’ coverage of the conferences.
2.2. Methodology
In this study, Fairclough’s (1989, 1995a) Dialectical-Relational Approach to CDA
and corpus techniques were employed in analyzing the newspapers’ coverage of the COPs.
2.2.1. The data
The newspapers were chosen as the source of the data because they are a good site
for ideology (Billig, 1995; Chouliaraki, 1999) and media discourse can exert a pervasive
influence on social reproduction (Fairclough, 1989). Particularly, The Independent and
The New York Times are the national news leaders of the countries where English is the
official language. Newspapers from other English-speaking countries are not considered
so as to ensure an in-depth and focused qualitative analysis.
The two study corpora consist of 779 articles (766,305 running words). Each article
mentions the key words ‘climate change’ at least once (see Carvalho, 2007; Boykoff and
Roberts, 2007). The study focuses on the coverage of the COPs rather than of all climate
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change events because the COP is the supreme decision-making body of the UNFCCC
and attracts enormous attention from the media to provide sufficient data. The sample
articles were published within one week before, during, and one week after the COPs
from 2004 to 2013. They were retrieved from the newspapers’ webpages and manually
checked to ensure that they actually covered the COPs.
2.2.2. Analytical framework
In this corpus-assisted CDA study, the data were first approached through our
frequency and collocation analysis with the software Wordsmith Tools 6.0 (Scott, 2012)
and then our manual concordance analysis, focusing on the power relations and their
linguistic manifestations.
a. Corpus analysis
First, frequency analysis helped verify the most frequently occurring countries in
the corpora, which are termed the nodewords. Second, collocation analysis examined the
adjectival, nominal, verbal, and adverbial collocates of the nodewords to identify the focus
of the concordance analysis. Thus, the corpus tools provided an overall look at the data
and assisted the manual analysis in Fairclough’s framework.
b. Fairclough’s analytical framework adopted in the study
The three-level analytical framework forms a unified whole, as indicated below.
Textual analysis
At this level, the study focused on the description of the linguistic features that
were frequent in the newspapers’ construction of the power relations among countries.
Fairclough (1989) analyzes textual features such as vocabulary, grammar, and textual
structures, but, very often, in one single text or a few texts. He states that “the procedure
should not be treated as a holy writ” (Fairclough, 1989: 109). Therefore, in consideration
of the fairly large data in this study, our manual concordance analysis focused on lexical
choice, lexical relation, metaphor, passivization, nominalization, and modality.
The lexical choices were analyzed for both the denoted and connoted meanings
in the discourse. For example, some pairs of words might be used to refer to the same
person, the same event, the same action, but might be imbued with different ideological
attachments.
The lexical relations such as reiteration, synonym, and metonymwere also analyzed
because they could convey the imprint of ideologies assigned to a certain social actor or
event. For example, the words freedom fighters and terrorists both refer to the same actors
but convey quite different ideologies: the former is legal while the latter illegal (Van Dijk,
1995).
Regarding metaphor, Fairclough (1989: 119-120) maintains that “different
metaphors have different ideological attachments.” The current study focused on the
conceptual metaphors in the discourse and their ideological attachments. For instance,
when the climate debate is metaphorically represented as a battleground, the ideological
significance is that the metaphor may orient people’s thinking of and attitude towards the
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A Critical Discourse Analysis of Power Relations in the Newspapers’ (Re)construction of...
debate and evoke their action for or against it, accordingly.
In terms of grammar, our analysis examined whether sentences were active or
passive, whether nominalizations were used, whether agency was ambiguous, and whether
there were important features of modality. Agentless passivization is supposed to remove
important political implications (Fairclough, 2000). The activization/passivization
category by van Leeuwen (1996) was used in our analysis. For instance, in “They insisted
on more help given to poor countries.” the poor countries are passivized as the beneficiary
of more help, and the help-giver is hidden. Moreover, modality is a matter of ideological
interest (Fairclough, 1989). For example, in “It is essential that fast-growing countries
share the burden of climate finance.” the modality essential signals the fast-growing
countries’ obligation.
Discursive analysis
In this study, the discursive analysis examined the newspapers’ political
commitments, the relation between the media and other industries, the media’s view of the
relation between themselves and the audience, their news agenda and values (Richardson,
2007). The Independent is considered centrist and commits to both economically
neoliberal and social democratic ideology (Carvalho and Burguess, 2005). The New York
Times is liberal capitalist (Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2010), adheres to balanced reporting
and emphasizes the conflict between the responsibility for climate change and economic
concerns.
Social analysis
At this level, the wider social context including an overview of climate change, the
historical background to the power relations among countries, the contemporary world’s
economy, the countries’ policies on climate change was used to explain the ideologies
and their linguistic manifestations. Climate change officially emerged on the world’s
agenda at the Earth Summit in 1992, when the UNFCCC was founded. So far, of all
the international legal frameworks, the Kyoto protocol has been the strongest since its
approval in 1997, but there are quite different attitudes to it. The developed countries
seek to replace the protocol because they see their development being undermined by
committing to it, while the developing countries defend their benefits with the protocol.
The incapability of governments to forge effective progress at the climate conferences
has historically been attributed to the divide and conflict between the developed and
developing countries (Parks and Roberts, 2010) due to their positions on who should pay
and how much should be paid for climate change (Beyerlin, 2006; Penetrante, 2010). The
conflict between countries’ economic concerns and immediate needs for climate safety
has made it hardly possible for the parties at the COPs to reach a consensus. Countries
have followed different agendas. The UK has taken steps to reach legally binding targets,
but its perceived credibility has declined. The U.S. has experienced political divide
about climate change and its Congress has not approved of the Kyoto protocol. The
rapidly developing nations, now considered emerging economies, are demanded to take
responsibilities but they still demand substantially.
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2.3. Findings and Discussion
Unity, conflict, and diversity were identified in the power relations among countries
in the study discourse. The power relations are discursively constructed to be symmetrical
at times and to be asymmetrical at others.
2.3.1. Unity
In both The Independent and The New York Times, the metaphors CLIMATE
CHANGE AS A DISEASE and CLIMATE CHANGE AS A THREAT/AWAR represent
climate change as a disease or a threat which treats all countries on an equal consideration.
For instance,
Excerpt 1: Our quality of life as we know it in both the developed and developing world
is at risk if changes are not made. (The Independent, 15 November 2006)
It can be postulated that the metaphorical “at risk” promotes international
cooperation while the agentless passivization (“changes are not made”) obscures the
agency of the change-making. Hence, the countries seem to be in an equal power relation
and unity.
In The New York Times’ concordances of “developed and developing countries” and
“developing countries”, the lexical choices of “all”, “common”, “alike”, “both”, “equal”,
“equally”, “join the battle against the climate change”, “in partnership with”, “jointly
signed up”, “act together”, “as well as”, and “put together a coalition with” imply a
cooperative relationship among countries and stress the importance of the unity of all
countries in dealing with climate change. This can be a strong argument for the promotion
of international cooperation and unity in climate politics (Scheffran et al., 2012). Also, the
war metaphors (“battle”, “act”, “coalition”) help depict a war in which climate change is
personified as the enemy against which all countries must act together to fight. Moreover,
through the personification of climate change, such as “Climate change has the potential
to increase” (The New York Times, 15 November 2006), climate change is represented as
an actor in place of the countries and humankind. Besides, the passivization of countries
mystifies who is actually held responsible for taking actions.
Additionally, the modalities tend to convey the desirability for an international
common system whereby all countries unite and act. For example,
Excerpt 2: In a policy statement, the [Australian] government said the final target would
depend on whether developed and developing nations, including major emitters like
China and India, could agree to binding reductions under a new United Nations climate
treaty next year. (The New York Times, 15 December 2008)
The modalities “would” and “could” manifest that the responsibility for climate
change, as advocated by the Australian government, does not only reside with the
developed countries but with the developing countries as well.
In brief, as all countries face the risks of climate change, they are at an equal
power relation and should, therefore, unite and cooperate with each other. However, this
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unity is not at an equal consideration with the following conflict and diversity, which
seem to showcase the asymmetrical power relation among countries at the global climate
conferences.
2.3.2. Conflict between the developed and developing countries
The divide of the world into developed and developing countries is the most
obvious ideological standpoint conveyed by the two newspapers. It is depicted as
early as in 2005 that there are “longstanding barriers” splitting the world into
dichotomies: the rich advanced developed industrialized countries versus the poor
developing vulnerable small countries. As the modifiers “the rich advanced developed
industrialized” and “the poor developing vulnerable small” seem bulky, the former is
termed the developed countries and the latter the developing countries. Particularly,
the adjacent pairs of “developed and developing”, “rich and poor” occurring at
the frequencies of 31 and 24 times, respectively, seem to underlie the newspapers’
tendency of putting these countries in proximity in language but splitting them
into dichotomous poles. The most frequent lexical choices that collocate with the
developed and developing countries include “further inequality”, “divided”, “divides”,
“divisions”, “gap”, “deep rifts”, “differences”, “deadlock”, “firewall”, “confrontation”,
“conflict”, “row”, “mistrust and animosity”, “near-collapse”, “substantial differences”,
“separate terms”, “clashes”, “continuing tensions”, “increasingly polarized dispute”, and
“argument” in The Independent; “increased tensions”, “gulf”, “divide”, “principle of
separate responsibilities”, “longstanding divides”, “old divide”, “targets”, “stability”,
“disastrous”, “mass”, “tensions”, “sovereignty”, “damages”, and “losses” in The New York
Times. These chains of vocabulary form consistent lexical cohesion, which paints a world
in which the developed and developing countries lie at two sides in a conflict or a war,
and the climate conferences are the battles.
This power relation between the developed and developing nations is delineated in
the Kyoto protocol which itself splits the world into two parts with their disparate duties.
For example,
Excerpt 3: Very few people seem to realize this, but the Kyoto protocol divided the world.
With its strict definitions of haves and have-nots, developed and developing, the divisions
between rich and poor enshrined in the 1997 treaty are almost as rigid as those between
the West and the Eastern bloc in the Cold War. Except that instead of an Iron Curtain,
what lies between the two sets of countries is known rather cryptically as "the firewall."
(The Independent, 14 December 2009)
The impersonality strategy of personifying the Kyoto Protocol hides who indeed
decided on the “differentiated responsibilities” and focuses the reader’s attention on
the unfairness of the protocol. Accompanied by the adjacent pairs of “developed and
developing”, “rich and poor”, this ontological metaphor implies an imbalanced relation
between those who are required to act (the developed countries) and those who are
not (the developing countries). Moreover, the power relation between the developed and
developing nations at the climate conferences is conceptualized as the division between
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