The field-specific representation of climate change in factual television: a multimodal critical discourse analysis

ABSTRACT

A common strategy in media communication on climate change is to tailor messages to the existing values of specific target audiences in order to make climate change mitigation attractive to them. The question how such field-specific messages are oriented towards the reality of climate change, however, is often neglected. As an alternative to the common framing approaches to media communication on climate change, this paper advances a discursive and semiotic perspective that takes the epistemological position of a constructivist realism with C.S. Peirce and focuses on the way the abstract object of climate change is represented and transformed in media discourse. With a methodological framework of multimodal critical discourse analysis, which builds on the discourse-historical approach and investigates different discursive strategies, the field-specific representation of climate change in two factual television programmes is critically analysed and the effects of an (in)sufficient orientation towards the object of climate change are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• media discourse
• factual television
• critical discourse analysis
• epistemology
• semiotics
• Peirce
• discourse-historical approach
• multimodality
• argumentation

Acknowledgements

This paper is part of my ongoing Ph.D. project that investigates discourses about climate change on Austrian television. I thank Martin Reisigl (University of Bern, Switzerland) and Brigitta Busch (University of Vienna, Austria) for their supervision of my thesis and for valuable comments on first drafts of this paper. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful remarks that have helped me to improve my paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Andrea Sabine Sedlaczek is a doctoral student at the Department of Linguistics of the University of Vienna. In her research, she is interested in combining CDS with the traditions of semiotics and multimodality, argumentation theory and ecolinguistics. In her Ph.D., she is investigating the discursive representation of climate change in factual television programmes in the context of media initiatives on Austrian public service broadcasting. To this end, she is developing an analytic framework of multimodal critical discourse analysis that combines the DHA, social semiotics, the semiotic theory of C.S. Peirce and argumentation theory. Email: [email protected].

ORCID

Andrea Sabine Sedlaczek http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7676-6158

Notes

1. Experimental studies on the impact of framed messages on climate change have either found little effect on engagement or have found that the effects are still contingent on knowledge about climate change (Albertson & Busby, 2015; Bernauer & McGrath, 2016).

2. In line with accepted Peirce scholarship, references to the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (1931–1958) are made with the abbreviation CP, followed by the numbers of the volume and the paragraph.

3. Bourdieu’s concepts have been previously used in field analyses investigating media discourses about climate change (Bacon & Nash, 2012; Sonnett, 2010).

4. All excerpts from the programmes are translations of the original German transcripts by the author. The basic transcription conventions are: capital letters for special emphasis, full stops and commas for falling intonation, acute accents and question marks for rising intonation and slashes for a break-off.

5. In the Anglo-American tradition, this position is frequently referred to as ‘creation care’ (Wardekker et al., 2008, p. 58f.).

6. This short signation involves a graphical depiction of a spinning globe and the verbal logo ‘Unser Klima’ (‘Our Climate’), which is accompanied by a rhythmic signature tune and a female voice-over stating the slogan of the initiative: ‘our climate. it lies in OUR hands’.