Australian Black Summer: a Discourse Analysis of Newspaper Articles Surrounding the 2019-2020 Bushfire Season

Existing studies show that the media play an important role in the framing of the climate change discourse. Furthermore, studies demonstrate that events provide opportunities for policy change discussions. These discussions, however, are not always centered around key problems and they do not necessarily lead to policy change. This paper analyzes how the 2019-2020 Australian bushfire season, an extreme weather event, affected the differing climate change discourses in the Australian media and whether these bushfires led to policy changes. Because the Australian media landscape is very polarized, and people usually tend to focus on news that confirms their beliefs, climate change discourses have become highly polarized as well. In this study, I have conducted a discourse analysis of articles from before, during, and after the fires from two left-wing and two right-wing Australian newspapers. The focus of this thesis is on three topics: climate change discourses from before and after...Show moreExisting studies show that the media play an important role in the framing of the climate change discourse. Furthermore, studies demonstrate that events provide opportunities for policy change discussions. These discussions, however, are not always centered around key problems and they do not necessarily lead to policy change. This paper analyzes how the 2019-2020 Australian bushfire season, an extreme weather event, affected the differing climate change discourses in the Australian media and whether these bushfires led to policy changes. Because the Australian media landscape is very polarized, and people usually tend to focus on news that confirms their beliefs, climate change discourses have become highly polarized as well. In this study, I have conducted a discourse analysis of articles from before, during, and after the fires from two left-wing and two right-wing Australian newspapers. The focus of this thesis is on three topics: climate change discourses from before and after the fires, differences between reporting from left-wing and right-wing newspapers, and policy change. For the first part, I found that the discourse shifted from climate policy to crisis preparedness. For the second part, the biggest differences were in what the newspapers decided to report on and how they framed solutions proposed by the political parties. For the final part, I found that the fires had led to policy change in the crisis preparedness domain. There were, however, no policy changes related to climate change itself.Show less

Leiden University Student Repository

Documents

In Collections

Australian Black Summer: a Discourse Analysis of Newspaper Articles Surrounding the 2019-2020 Bushfire Season