News values construed in BBC climate stories

Introduction

As climate change continues to raise global concern, analysis of environmental stories has become increasingly relevant. The European Commission emphasizes this urgency, stating: “Climate change is the biggest challenge of our time [..]. We are at a turning point in the fight against climate change” (European Commission 2021, 7).
As a result, environmental discourse has become increasingly significant, experiencing “a rise of interest in this issue in many disciplines–including in linguistics, where a branch of ecolinguistics is explicitly concerned with the relation between language and the environment” (Bednarek and Caple 2012, 107). However, while environmental reporting in journalism has been considerably researched, systematic analysis of language and image is hardly offered (ibid. 107). Disaster reporting as a subset of environmental reporting “demands attention” because climate disasters are becoming “more common” (ibid. 108).
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