Energy security in the news: North/South perspectives

Abstract

Analysis of newspaper reporting on the topic of energy security in eight countries – four from the global North (France, Germany, the UK, and the United States) and four from the global South (China, India, Brazil, and South Africa) – produces no support for the thesis that news is disseminated from core countries to the periphery and semi-periphery. There is an important difference between China and the other three fast-developing countries and a highly asymmetric flow of news not aligned to old core-periphery boundaries. In general, energy security is mainly covered in trade and business outlets and less in newspapers with mass circulation, indicating that the topic is still an elite concern. In some instances, attention has surged at the same time in different countries. But very few of these instances show a homogenous coverage across countries. Despite increasingly globalised media, news is created and consumed at a national level.

Keywords:

• energy security
• global media
• BRICs
• corpus linguistics

Acknowledgements

We thank Ma Wenjun, Feng Xiaomin, Wu Shi, and Wu Nan, Ramesh Krishnamurthy, and Patricia Rodríguez Inés for valuable assistance with data downloading. Special thanks to Ningning Wang who provided crucial input for the analysis of Chinese and English language data. Chris Bolsmann and Ramesh Krishnamurthy helped us interpret the data for South Africa and India. We are indebted to two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

^1. One reviewer objected to using the term ‘homogenisation’ because the fact that two news sources cover the same issue says nothing about the ways those sources treat, interpret, or (re)construct that issue. While we agree with this, our method only deals with textual evidence based on corpus methods and therefore does not venture into the terrain of interpreting or reconstructing these issues.

^2. See Grundmann and Krishnamurthy (2010) and Grundmann and Scott (2013) for analyses of different terms associated with climate change.

^3. The order and even selection may be different with other statistics: MI3 gives supply, security, efficiency, threat, farms, wind, and renewable in that order. For more detail on this, see Oakes (1998).

^4. Purists might object that the reference corpus contains the study data in each case. Studies comparing reference data either including or excluding the study data have shown similar results.

^5. In future analysis, we intend to construct sub-corpora by separating newspapers from newswires which would allow us to make more precise comparisons between different sources and study whether newspapers take up phrases coined by newswires.

^6. The list of LexisNexis sources headed ‘All News, all languages’ (accessed Feb. 2012) does not include, for example, Valor Econômico (although the data we obtained from them do include that source), Correio Braziliense, and Jornal do Brasil. It lists the following languages only: Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.

^7. A case in point illustrating this might be a text headed Biofuels and food shortages (Times, 12 March 2008) which is clearly a letter to the editor arguing that some of the UK’s wheat crop should be used as biofuel. It is more about biofuels and the wheat crop than it is about ES. The word energy is not present though fuel security does appear twice in fewer than 200 words. In other cases, an article may appear, from its headline, to be about a political row, but in the body of the text clearly relates the row to fuel or natural resources.

^8. Similar observations were made with regard to climate change; see Boykoff (2007) and Grundmann and Scott (2013).

^9. Writing in 2000, Boyd-Barrett stated an ‘overwhelming Euro-American dominance of global news flow’ (Boyd-Barrett 2000, p. 12), an assessment which we cannot confirm.