| Popis: |
open access journal Climate change is the single most pressing existential threat facing humanity, and while the scientific consensus is unassailable, how this knowledge is communicated to and circulated by the public suggests that – in the minds of the public, at least – the science is not yet settled. While there are many reasons that might underpin this perception, given the role of newspapers as conveyors of information in the public interest, how information about climate change is articulated becomes a matter of importance in terms of leveraging changes in consumer behaviour and voter priorities. In this paper, using below-the-line comments of two British national daily online newspapers by readers responding to articles on climate change related topics over a period of six years, from 2014 to 2019 inclusive, as corpora, I explore how the matter of climate change is understood and articulated by applying linguistic analyses to generate profiles characterising the discourse of each corpus. This study lends broad support to earlier research by demonstrating that the readership of the politically right-leaning newspaper tends towards an ‘attack discourse’ and general scepticism, even hostility, towards the scientific consensus, while the readership of the politically left leaning paper evidence support for the consensus. The paper concludes by considering some of the implications of these findings for scientific communications about climate change. |
