One of the conclusions of Beatriz Gallardo Paúls’ new book, Dejemos de hablar (solo) del clima (Let’s stop talking (just) about the climate), is the small role the Third Sector plays on the press covering on climate change: she also underlines that climate activists often present themselves with a negative vision. On the contrary, the protagonists of the human action related to climate changes are political figures. The book, with the subtitle El discurso periodístico sobre el cambio climático y la transición ecológica (The press discourse on climate change and the ecological transition), analyzes the way in which El País and El Mundo cover both issues, and focuses specifically on the framing of the discourse of the news published in 2007, 2019 and 2023, three years selected due to their news density from an initial sample of 474,202 news pieces published in national media between 1994 and 2024, on climate change and ecological transition.
The first evidence that draws our attention in the final corpus is that the ecological transition (whose subject is the society or the citizenry) has way less presence than climate change (whose subject is the planet and, with it, the fauna or nature in general); and this idea serves as an starting point for the main proposal of the book: “we will propose to stop talking (just) about climate change to make the ecological transition the main point of the communication, in a way citizens may see themselves as protagonists of this discourse and, this way, of this transition” (p.21). The second relevant characteristic refers to the different attention both media allocate to this topic, since El País contributed a 70.2% to the global sample (N=995) and El Mundo, 29.8% (N=445). This difference has been already pointed out in previous studies.
The book begins with a bibliographic review regarding the CCC (Communication on Climate Change) and the main approaches it assumes; and the chronology of global actions lead by the UN since the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel (IPCC) in 1988 is also presented. The predominant approach in data refers to environmental journalism, an specialized, science-based approach whose protagonist is the planet. This review allows to check the relevance of the matter and the preponderance of the psicologist model in the analysis of the persuasion of the CCC.
The second part of the book contains dana analysis, from an model developed by the author in the last years and that examines the different levels of the framing. The enunciative level of the analysis focuses on the lexicon, syntaxis and illocutivity. Regarding the lexicon, it is shown that the semantic field of “green transition | green | energetic” does not appear until the 2019 corpus (although data suggest that there terms are emergent among the press from 2011-2012 onwards), confirming the anchoring of this issue in the sphere of science and the planet. The analysis of the actancy (“predicative stategy”) is confined to the analysis of the titles contained in the corpus. There are two important conclusions in this regard: first, that the “predominance of the political representants is absolute in the two media and in the three years” (p.197); the second, the different treatment of the increasing young protagonists, positive in El País, but barely shown in El Mundo and, besides, takes a negative point of view, specially towards Greta Thunberg. Last, the analysis of the intentionality of the texts confirms what is a characteristic of the texts in the press, which is the predominance of a representative illocution; the analysis of the expressive dimension sheds light on the importance of certain texts of negative framing, close to “colapse-ism”.
The second level of the framing refers to the textual level, and includes the para-text (not analyzed), the topic/informative organization, and text structures, which is, journal genres. Numerous topoi emerge, which combine narrative and argumentative packages: the catastrophic impact of climate change to the planet, the political resistance to be coherent with the scientific consensus, the attempts to blame the citizens for their alleged irresponsible actions… An evident difference between both papers is that El Mundo uses more interviews, which allows for some distance to the discourse, while El País addresses this issue with numerous editorials, and in front pages.
The analysis finishes with the interactive strategies of framing. The study of the inter-textuality of the texts concludes that El Mundo prioritizes scientific voices against political ones, while El País gives more importance to political voices.
Secondly, the alignment strategy, as the way in which journalistic texts add to the political conversation as an authorized voice, leads the author to stress a clear difference between both journals: “both take part in the building of a discourse we called counter-denialist, although in El Mundo an open character of Ciceronian concession is assumed, since the already mentioned political parallelism drives it to try some equilibria between the scientific consensus and the right-wing and (in 2019 and 2023) far-right politicians’ positions” (p.199).
The last analyzed strategy is the affiliation strategy; the author begins by pointing out the difference between climate change politization and the fact that its treatment is, undeniably, a political matter, with different presences of the conservative and progressive agendas. The analysis focuses on what kind of recipients, among six profiles, create the texts of both papers: the motivated recipient (alarmed or interested), the indifferent recipient (cautious or disconnected), and the denialist recipient (skeptical or contemptuous). From a number of characteristics, the analysis concludes that both journals publish reports of specialized journalism aimed at motivated recipients; the difference lies in the fact that, precisely among opinion articles, El Mundo does offer pieces that include misinformation, hoaxes and alarmism, that may result in interesting (journalism of confirmation) to indifferent or denialist recipients.
The essential point that arises from the analysis is the information loop; the predominance of the scientific approach is interpreted by Gallardo-Paúls as an indirect speech act, as a transgression of the relevance maxim: “the media speak about whales, the artic permafrost or the coral reefs because that way they avoid discussing the elephant in the room, which is no other that the lack of coherent political action with the worrying menace that science has been warning of for, at least, four decades” (p.201).
