The Portrayal of Environmental Concerns: An Ecolinguistic Analysis of Media Discourse

Abstract

The global focus on environmental/climatic concerns and sustainability has intensified in recent years due to the growing recognition of the urgent need for action to mitigate and adapt to climate change. As one of the key goals of Saudi Vision 2030, the Saudi Green Initiative strives to mitigate the effects of climate change and improve biodiversity through multiple measures including promulgating awareness and responsibility in the general public. With this respect, undoubtedly media plays a crucial role in shaping public opinion and influencing policy decisions. Therefore, it is essential to investigate how environmental issues and sustainability are portrayed in media discourse in the Saudi context. This research intends to analyze media representations of environmental concerns specifically in English newspaper discourse using an eco-linguistic framework. For the said purpose, the corpus developed was based on content published in Arab News an English newspaper, and analyzed through Sketch Engine and LancsBox6.0 software. The key frames that emerged were evaluated and interpreted both statistically and qualitatively to ascertain the role of media in imparting and creating collective consciousness regarding the need for sustainable environmental actions. The study demonstrated that the newspaper discourse portrayed the climate concerns effectively by framing the climate as a change, crisis, fight, and collective social responsibility through discursive strategies such as frequent repetition of concepts, specific lexical choices like negative, strong expressive words as well as techniques of naming and making concrete references. Additionally, the writers suggested practical solutions and measures people and nations must need to take collectively to address the ever-growing climate challenges.