Speculations about the Future: Populism and Climate Change in News Discourse

Climate change has been one of the most contentious and divisive issues in politics in the last thirty years. Governments have applied different sets of logics and priorities to climate change over time, ranging from the frontline of climate change supporters to active obstructionism (Beeson and McDonald 2013). Climate change has been central to political election campaigns and debates throughout the years. For instance, in 2009 the future Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott announced his opposition to the Rudd Government's Emissions Trading Scheme proposal, and eventually achieved Liberal leadership over this issue. Similarly Donald Trump was decisive not only in driving policy priorities on climate change, but in undermining public consensus on the science of climate change and the need for action. Politicians have diversely “framed” their positions on climate change, alternatively foregrounding or backgrounding risk and planning (Goffman 1974). This has resulted in heated and contested accounts in media coverage. In the case of right-wing populism, climate change science has become a feared scapegoat that is blamed for threatening or damaging society, through appeals to common-sense and anti-intellectualism (Wodak 2015: 1-2). Yet, the ‘fear’ of climate change may also be regarded as a threat to an imagined homogenous people inside a well-protected territory (Russo 2017). Based on the premise that the power of media discourse lies in the repetition and incremental effect of images and language patterns, which may be closely examined to reveal presuppositions, cultural stereotypes and ideological inferences in discourse (Stubbs 2001), this chapter closely enquires into the circulation of familiar and seemingly new discourses on climate change. The paper focusses on the ‘discourse of the future’ in order to draw some conclusions on the current representation of climate change in newspaper reports (Fairclough 1995; Reisigl and Wodak 2001; Talbot 2007). Speculations about the future are one of the most prominent outcomes of the emergence of ‘new long journalism’ i.e. the shift from the reporting of the details of events to the analysis of the importance of those events. Yet speculations about the future and media oracles may not be incidental but central to ethics and ‘cosmopolitics’ as the potential trigger of racism and/or solidarity (Thrift 2004). Particularly when the speculation level is high, it may provide a fertile ground for “media spinning, scaring the public, creating solidarity, and diverting attention” (Neiger 2007). Thus, the paper draws on findings in Corpus and Critical Discourse Analysis in order to compare speculations about the future in a corpus of Anglophone online news reports (2004-2017). The comparison will hopefully provide significant insights on how news discourse shapes translocal social knowledge, scripts and repertoires and creates translocal audiences.