Changing Climates: Discourses around climate change in the British and Brazilian news media
Carmen Dayrell
CASS, Lancaster University
This paper explores the interactions between society and media coverage in the context of climate change. We are interested in examining the debate surrounding climate change within the public sphere across Britain and Brazil by looking into how the issue has been framed in the news media within these societies. Our ultimate goal is to gain a better understanding of the role of the news media in shaping public opinion. To this end we carry out a large-scale comparative analysis of the discourses around climate change within British and Brazilian major newspapers in the past decade or so (2003-2013). By combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics methods, we explore similarities and differences across the two datasets. This paper reports our preliminary findings regarding key elements of the media treatment of climate change issues within each society.