Climate change discourse in Canadian print media : A quantitative and qualitative analysis of print media from two Canadian regions

Sammanfattning: Over the last 30 years, awareness of anthropogenic climate change has increased and quickly become the one of the most pressing issues facing our planet. Canada is both a nation that has contributed to the acceleration of the climate problem and one that aims to help address the issues through commitments to global climate accords and other accountability actions. Global journalism is both a theory and practice born of the evolution of our world into a more global collective. Climate change, as a problem that is faced by every nation in the world, is one subject matter area that has been difficult to report on in the past but more necessary than ever to discuss. It is crucial work for journalists to normalize the connections between people, places, problems, and how they are interrelated throughout the world. This thesis aims to explore the presence or absence of global journalism in two different regions of Canada: Alberta and Ontario, represented by the cities of Calgary and Ottawa. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, articles that mention“climate change” or “global warming” over a six-month period in 2015 are collected and catalogued. The quantitative data provides a macro view of the amount and kinds of discourse taking place in each city around the topics of climate change and global warming, giving a sense of the scale and framing of the issue. Four of these articles and two headlines are then reviewed through the lens of critical discourse analysis for their choice of words, quotations, the voices that are present and absent, and the local coherence of the article. Collectively, this information is collated and reviewed to argue for the presence or absence of global journalism in the reporting. The final results should a stark difference in the representation of climate change in Calgary and Ottawa. There are promising signs of global journalism in action throughout the Calgary Herald, while the Ottawa Citizen has missed opportunities to reflect the same global perspective.