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

Abstract

ABSTRACTA 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.