Media Representations of Climate Change in UK News Articles

Assignment Brief

Write a 10-page (A4, 12-pt font and double-spaced) project essay on ONE of the following topics

Choose a topic, an issue, a genre, an author, or a literary text (or texts) that interests you, and explore it using the methods of corpus linguistics.

Start by choosing your target data, which could be a topic (e.g. surfing; the fashion industry; Irish dancing; a controversial pop star), or an issue (e.g. tuition fees; global warming; euthanasia), or a genre (e.g. sports news reporting; academic prose; romantic fiction; rap song lyrics), or an author (e.g. Charles Dickens; Jane Austen), or a literary text (or texts) that interests you, and which can be explored using the methods of corpus linguistics.

Possible areas of investigation include (but are not limited to):

1. a comparison of the structure and vocabulary of two genres of fiction (e.g. romantic fiction versus detective fiction), or one genre (e.g. live sports commentary) versus other genres;

2. the arguments and agenda of the opposing sides in a major debate (e.g. university tuition fees, animal experimentation), media representations of a religion (e.g. Islam, Judaism) or a social group (e.g. immigrants from certain places), media representations of a celebrity (e.g. one who is controversial or one whose popularity over the years has changed);

3. the language of participants in a TV or radio program (e.g. BBC weather forecasters, the panel judges on a TV show).

Introduce your essay with

1. a short background to your chosen topic, issue, genre, author, or literary text(s)

2. a presentation and discussion of the research questions that you will be using to guide your analysis

3. a presentation of a hypothesis or predictions about what you expect to find in the corpus

Compile a suitable corpus of texts for answering your research questions or create a sub-corpus from an existing corpus (i.e. the BNC). You may use any appropriate method to compile the corpus: downloading texts from the internet, extracting texts from an existing corpus, from a library database (e.g. Lexis Nexis or Gale Newsstand), or scraping tweets from twitter etc. Briefly describe the method you have used to collect the data, the contents of the corpus and its target audience. In an appendix to your essay, add a list or table of primary sources that you have used, indicating for each source its website or bibliographic reference, the number of words in the text, and the type of data it contains. If there are too many sources to list, simply give the first 10. Provide a quantitative and qualitative analysis of your corpus and relate the answers to your research questions and hypotheses.

You will probably find the following methods most useful:

1. keywords (derived by comparison with a general ‘reference’ corpus, or by comparing parts of your corpus against each other);

2. collocations (e.g. collocates of selected keywords);

3. analysis of concordances (i.e. example sentences) showing typical or atypical patterns of use of selected keywords;

4. you may, if you wish, additionally annotate your corpus with part-of-speech tags, or semantic tags, and then incorporate these into your analysis.

Review your findings: To what extent did the corpus findings show you something you did not already know at the beginning? Referring to previous articles and books in corpus linguistics, and (if possible) in the subject area you are investigating, evaluate the usefulness of the methods and data you have used.

You must use a 12-point font, double spaced and your essay should not exceed 10 pages. This does not include your reference list. Any content that goes over the page limit will not be marked.

Sample Answer

Media Representations of Climate Change in UK News Articles

Introduction

Climate change has become one of the defining issues of the twenty-first century, and the way it is discussed in the media plays a crucial role in shaping public understanding, policy debates, and behavioural responses. While scientific consensus on global warming is well established, the representation of climate change across news media varies greatly in tone, emphasis, and political framing. This essay uses corpus linguistics to explore how UK newspapers represent climate change. It focuses on the language used to describe causes, consequences, and responsibilities related to global warming, investigating patterns that reveal ideological biases or agenda-setting tendencies.

The main research questions guiding this analysis are:

1. How do UK newspapers linguistically frame climate change?

2. Which words most frequently co-occur with key terms such as “climate change” and “global warming”?

3. Do conservative and liberal newspapers differ in their representation of climate change, and if so, how?

The hypothesis is that conservative newspapers will downplay urgency, use more neutral or sceptical language, and emphasise economic costs, while liberal newspapers will employ emotive and urgent vocabulary, highlighting moral responsibility and scientific authority.

Corpus Description and Methodology

To answer these questions, a specialised corpus was created using online news articles published between January 2020 and June 2024. Articles were collected from two major UK newspapers: The Guardian (left-leaning) and The Daily Telegraph (right-leaning). The corpus was compiled manually using web scraping tools and stored in plain text format. A total of 300 articles were collected, 150 from each publication, amounting to approximately 1.2 million words.

The target audience for this corpus is the British public who consume online news media. The study employed AntConc software for keyword analysis, collocation, and concordance examination. A reference corpus (the British National Corpus, BNC) was used to identify statistically significant keywords, enabling comparison between general English and the climate discourse found in news texts.

Quantitative Findings

The keyword analysis revealed that The Guardian corpus frequently used terms such as crisis, emergency, action, scientists, and future, while The Daily Telegraph corpus showed more frequent use of terms such as cost, policy, debate, tax, and energy. This suggests distinct framing approaches: The Guardian constructs climate change as an urgent moral and environmental challenge, whereas The Telegraph tends to frame it as a political or economic issue.

Collocation analysis further supported this difference. In The Guardian, the term “climate change” most often co-occurred with words like tackle, mitigate, fight, and accelerating, conveying active agency and immediacy. In The Telegraph, common collocates included policy, targets, industry, and impact, which reflected a more bureaucratic and pragmatic orientation.

Frequency counts of modal verbs also revealed interesting contrasts. The Guardian frequently used must and should, suggesting obligation and urgency (e.g., “We must act now to prevent catastrophe”), whereas The Telegraph favoured could and might, introducing uncertainty or speculation (e.g., “New policies could affect household bills”).

Qualitative Analysis

Concordance analysis provided more nuanced insights. In The Guardian, climate change was consistently framed within moral and humanitarian discourses. For example, sentences such as “Climate change is the defining crisis of our time” and “Leaders must show courage to protect the planet” appeal to collective responsibility and emotional engagement. The language is action-oriented and inclusive, urging readers to see themselves as part of the solution.

Conversely, The Telegraph often positioned climate change within debates about policy effectiveness or political division. Phrases like “Climate targets risk damaging the economy” and “New net-zero policies face backlash from business leaders” illustrate a more cautious and economically grounded perspective. The tone is less emotive and more analytical, appealing to rational evaluation rather than moral urgency.

The analysis also revealed subtle differences in agency. In The Guardian, agents of change are typically collective (“we”, “governments”, “communities”), whereas in The Telegraph, agency is often attributed to external entities such as “the EU”, “activists”, or “environmentalists”. This difference reflects underlying ideological tendencies: one promotes shared action, while the other distances the reader from responsibility.

Continued...