Climate Change Discourse. Remediation and Recontextualization in News and Social Media

Numerous scholars have pointed out that citizens’ awareness, attitudes and actions towards climate change are shaped by mediated information (Bevitori, 2011, 2014; Boycoff and Boycoff, 2004; Carvalho and Burgess, 2005; Russo 2018; Russo and Wodak 2017). News media play an important role in the popularization of climate science and scientific evaluations of climate-related risks. In order to make risk decisions, citizens seek information, which is increasingly circulated through online news media, and later re-mediated in social media, such as facebook and twitter, or face-to-face conversations. Yet, when climate-change discourse is re-mediated, its recontextualisation redefines the meaning assigned to climate change terminology and discourse due to the influence of news values such as negativity, personalization, impact, superlativeness, novelty, and expectation (Bednarek 2006, 2008). For instance, certain events, such as environmental disasters or announcements by prominent scientist or politicians, fulfil news values more than others (Bell, 1991; Fowler, 1991; van Dijk, 1988). Yet, as Bednarek and Caple note (2012, p. 44; 2017, p. 79), news values and newsworthiness should be conceptualized in terms of how events or propositions are construed through discourse. In their opinion, “newsworthiness is not inherent in events but established through language and image” (Bednarek and Caple, 2012, pp. 41). Indeed, the discourse of climate change has changed over time in order to avoid editorial fatigue and satisfy news values (Boycoff and Boycoff, 2007; Carvalho and Burgess, 2005; Bevitori, 2011).