The climate crisis is recognised as the defining issue of our time. Overwhelming scientific evidence has shown for three decades that rising temperatures will affect the living conditions for all life on earth (Stoddard et al., In press). However, it took until 2018 before it was extensively discussed in the growingly influential far-right media ecosystem in Sweden. As a response to increasing coverage in legacy media – both in Sweden and abroad (Nacu-Schmidt et al., 2020; Vi-skogen & Retriever, 2019, 2020) – climate change became an important issue also for the far right. But, as we show in this study, instead of taking it seriously, a discourse was created where climate change was put into ironic quotation marks, and anyone demanding action was ridiculed.
In this article, we examine the climate change discourse on three far-right media sites during the years 2018–2019. The sites are
The strategy of denouncing climate change as a hoax has roots back to the late-1980s as a tactic by extractive companies such as Exxon Mobil (Boykoff, 2011; Oreskes & Conway, 2011). In the US – and to some extent in Canada and Australia – the collaboration between fossil fuel interests and conservative think tanks in questioning climate science has been revealed in an array of studies (e.g., Brulle, 2014; Farrell, 2016; Jacques & Knox, 2016; McCright & Dunlap, 2003; Young & Coutinho, 2013). They show how what Riley Dunlap and Aaron McCright (2011) named the “climate change denial machine” was highly funded, and how it manufactured and pushed contrarian arguments into what Benkler and colleagues (2018) recently named the right-wing media ecosystem. The current sharp ideological divide between Republicans and Democrats in the US on climate science has not always existed. It is partly a function of strategic lobbyism by fossil fuel interests and conservative think tanks, which has taken advantage of, and fuelled, a growing rift during the last 30 years. In Europe, recent research shows that contrarian think tanks have been active in spreading denial since the mid-1990s, and that they have increased their output in recent years (Almiron et al., 2020; Ekberg & Pressfeldt, 2021). In the UK, which has a polarised media system, climate change denial has been prominent in opinion pieces in the right-wing media (Painter & Ashe, 2012).
Since 2000, concern over climate change has generally increased in Sweden (Rönnerstrand, 2019). There was a consensus in legacy media around the science of climate change until 2006, when a marked upturn in reporting accompanied the creation of a more organised climate change denial movement in the form of the Climate Realists (formerly the Stockholm Initiative) (Anshelm & Hultman, 2014). This influenced the far-right party, the Sweden Democrats (SD), who started spreading doubt about climate science in the parliament in 2013 (Hultman et al., 2019). Since entering the parliament in 2010, SD has enjoyed increased electoral support in every election, winning votes from both the Social Democrats and the Moderates (liberal-conservative), as well as engaging an electorate that previously did not vote. In the last election, in 2018, the party received 17.5 per cent of the vote (Aylott & Bolin, 2019). The Sweden Democrats’ main focus is immigration, and they position themselves as the only opposition party, claiming the other seven parties “are all the same” (Rydgren & van der Meiden, 2019).
The legacy, or traditional, news media in Sweden is characterised by two large public service broadcasters in television and radio and four national and several local newspapers. The media is self-regulated through the Code of Ethics for Press, Radio and Television in Sweden, and a system of public press subsidies is designed to secure a pluralistic media system. While the legacy media outlets position themselves both to the left and right politically in their opinion pieces, they all adhere to what Benkler and colleagues (2018: 77) characterise as professional truth-seeking norms in a “reality-check dynamic”:
Outlets compete on the truth and freshness of their news, and the search for scoops and sensationalism is in tension with the internal norms and the fact that other outlets will try to build their own credibility and audience in part by policing them if they get it wrong.
The reality-check dynamic might be one of the reasons why the consensus around climate science continued in Swedish legacy media even after the formation of the Climate Realists and the rise of SD. But even if climate change was not denied, it was arguably under-reported. After the climate summit in 2009, interest dropped, and it was only in 2018 and 2019 that it again reached the same levels, when the heatwave, drought, and unprecedented wildfires in the summer of 2018 – together with Greta Thunberg's school strike movement the following autumn – marked an increase in reporting on climate (Vi-skogen & Retreiver, 2019, 2020).
During the last decade, far-right anti-immigration alternative media has become an increasingly influential phenomena in Sweden and abroad (Haller et al., 2019; Nygaard, 2019; Ylä-Anttila et al., 2019). The term “alternative media” has traditionally been used for media initiatives on the left side of the political spectrum. Holt and colleagues (2019) argue that an umbrella definition of alternative media is needed to connect present research with the previous body of literature. The essence is that alternative media perceive itself in opposition to a hegemonic media discourse “corrupted by, dependent on and uncritical of the establishment” (Holt et al., 2019: 861). Nygaard (2019) and Holt (2018) distinguish “immigration-critical alternative media” but this term does not capture the ideological questions that affect their reporting on climate change. A similar term is “counter-media” (Ylä-Anttila et al., 2019), which highlights the oppositional character but misses the ideological dimension. Instead, we use the term far-right alternative media, but we acknowledge that the this is a broad characterisation that includes ideological variance. Changes in the public press subsidy system in 2020, making digital media eligible for subsidies if they follow professional norms, led to
An empirically noted, but so far under-studied, subject is how opposition to climate change has become a core feature of the European far right (Forchtner & Kølvraa, 2015; Forchtner et al., 2018; Jeffries, 2017; Lockwood, 2018). Most studies focusing on these themes analyse the rhetoric of politicians or political parties (e.g., Forchtner, 2019; Schaller & Carius, 2019) and show how far-right anti-immigration parties such as Alternative for Deutschland, SD, and the Austrian FPÖ, to different degrees, have opposed climate change mitigation policies and spread doubt about the science. Some studies show how far-right media can send mixed messages, opposing climate change action while still being supportive of local environmental issues such as the German forest (Forchtner & Özvatan, 2019). Others have, via surveys, shown a strong correlation between climate change denialism and nationalism (Kulin et al., 2021); conspiracy theories (Lewandowsky et al., 2015); distrust in public service media (Jylhä et al., 2020); and opposition to feminism and immigration (Jylhä & Hellmer, 2020; Krange et al., 2018). The latter is also seen in a study of online groups in Germany (Kaiser & Puschmann, 2017).
Little research has been done regarding climate change on far-right media, and no peer-reviewed studies focus on how the Swedish far-right media ecosystem report on climate change. In a corpus collected for a study on far-right media in 2016 – which included all the sites in this study
In order to explore how the Swedish far-right media ecosystem reported on climate change during 2018–2019, we focused on three media sites.
The corpus was collected through a search in the Nordic digital press archive Retriever, conducted in March 2020. By using the search string “klimat* OR uppvärmning OR *greta*” [“climate* OR warming OR *greta*”], we received a total of 750 articles from the three sites. The reason to include “*greta*” was to not miss any reporting about climate activist Greta Thunberg. One could argue that this makes any article count meaningless, as there would be no articles written about Thunberg before she started her strike. Conducting the search without “*greta*”, however, still resulted in 733 articles, meaning the term had limited effect on the number of articles, but the few included might provide insight into how the far-right media ecosystem reacted to the activist's rise to fame. After removing 152 articles not related to climate change (mainly about the “political climate” or “the climate of debate”), two duplicates, three articles that had been removed from the sites, and three articles on
We see discourse as “being socially constitutive as well as socially conditioned” (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997: 258), and as such, discourses of climate change are shaped by – and help shape – societal responses to greenhouse gas emissions and rising temperatures. Discourses are also elements of social processes. Building on the work of Norman Fairclough, we see the “order of discourse” as the semiotic aspect of a relatively stable and established social practice situated in wider social structures. The order of discourse consists of genres (“ways of acting”), styles (“ways of being”), and discourses (“ways of representing”) (Fairclough, 2010: 74–75). The far-right media ecosystem can be seen as a social practice, and its order of discourse is thus made up of genres (e.g., news reporting, columns), styles (e.g., authoritarian, claiming to be corrective of legacy media) and discourses (e.g., nativist, anti-immigration/racist, anti-establishment). As we see in the article count, the discourse of climate change has recently been added, and in the remainder of the article, we are mainly concerned with
To connect the discourse of climate change in the far-right media ecosystem with previous work on climate change denial, we follow Stanley Cohen's (2001) classification scheme (for previous use in climate research, see, e.g., Björnberg et al., 2017; Norgaard, 2011). Cohen suggests there are three different answers to the question of what is denied. The first is literal denial – to say that something is not happening; in the climate context, these are arguments about the earth not heating up or that it is not caused by humans. The second is interpretive denial – reinterpreting the meaning of what is happening in a way that it loses significance; for example, to claim that global warming is positive. The third is implicatory denial; this is not about denying the knowledge, but rather its moral, political, and psychological implications and how individuals, institutions, or states do not act despite knowing they should. Cohen (2001: 103) stresses that different types of denial often appear simultaneously, as their relationship is “ideological, rather than logical”.
Combining a toolkit from CDA with Cohen's scheme, we have closely examined all articles in our corpus twice, asking two questions:
What types of perceived climate change knowledge are used? This relates to the sources of information. We examine if the far-right media ecosystem is informed by the established science or by the climate change countermovement, and what tropes of denial might be used. What strategies are used to spread information and disinformation? Disinformation spreads easily in a system characterised by the propaganda feedback loop. Here we look at semiotic aspects, such as meaning-making metaphors and keywords, and at different political strategies.
The climate change discourse on the right-wing media ecosystem is dominated by literal and interpretative denial. Climate threat-sceptics have identified a series of basic problems with climate science as it is presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Among these are deviations from the scientific method, the accuracy of climate models, modelling of the carbon cycle and questionable data adjustments, which will be discussed at the conference. All quotes from the empirical material are translated by Kjell Vowles.
Another example of how
While
The literal denial on
The argument about climate change as a hoax is a clear contrast to legacy media where climate science is taken as real. The reinterpretation of climate change as hoax is marked in
This denotation of climate change becomes a core discoursal feature on the right-wing media ecosystem. In dialectical relation to the mainstream media discourse, where climate is seen as a serious issue, the keywords here are distanced to provoke ridicule and irony. The quotation marks are used in two related but slightly different ways. The first is to pick out specific words from a longer quotation. An example is when
The second way to use quotation marks is the so-called scare quotes. Scare quotes do not refer to someone else's words, but signal that the word has a different meaning than its literal interpretation. This is a way of quoting that the German philologist Victor Klemperer acknowledged in the language of the Third Reich, commenting that the “excessive use of what I would call ironic quotation marks […] does not restrict itself to quoting, but questions instead the truth of what is quoted and declares the quoted content a lie” (Klemperer, 1947, cited in Vandergriff, 2012). The use of scare quotes has been noted in recent scholarship on the present far-right in regard to refugees (Kreis, 2017), and in passing in connection to the climate (Forchtner et al., 2018). It was also used by the Sweden Democrats who put climate in scare quotes in their 2016 budget (Hultman et al., 2019). In our corpus, scare-quoting is used extensively, one example is when
One way of opposing action on climate is to avert the blame. The claim that the actions of a small country like Sweden are negligible in a global context is a form of implicatory denial that is repeatedly used, for example, in an opinion piece claiming that “even if we closed Sweden completely our reduced carbon dioxide emissions would be eaten up in a few weeks by China's rising emissions. Sweden is responsible for 1 permille of the global emissions of greenhouse gases” (R. Malm, 2019). This is a framing of the problem implying that nothing can be done nationally. As part of the Global North, Sweden has a large historic carbon footprint, and is obliged by the Paris Agreement to cut its emissions faster (Anderson et al., 2020), so by pointing the finger of blame elsewhere, the moral and political implications are being denied.
Another strategy is to attack anyone promoting action on climate change, which is done mainly in two different ways. The first is by portraying politicians and other climate change leaders as a greedy, hypocritical elite. An example is when
The second type of attack is the spreading of conspiracy theories. This is most clearly articulated in
The climate change discourse on the Swedish far-right media ecosystem in the years 2018–2019 can be summed up as being
Turning to our research questions, we can see the following:
It is mainly The far-media ecosystem uses the strategies of scare-quoting climate, recircling conspiracy theories, and using anti-establishment rhetoric to oppose any action on climate change. These strategies are based on the literal denial of climate change, but implicatory denial is used to avert blame. The propaganda feedback helps to propel and amplify these strategies.
One point of note is that very few articles – and only from
On the basis of our results, we suggest that further studies are needed of You-Tube material (
Sweden is often touted, both nationally and internationally, as a climate-progressive country, but the Swedish climate law does not, for example, comply with the Paris Agreement (Anderson et al., 2020). On a societal level, this constitutes a form of implicatory denial, to accept the facts but not act accordingly, but we know little about how this might interact with the discourses of the far right to create inertia. A final suggestion for further research is then to investigate how the climate denial discourse in the far-right media ecosystem connects to climate discourse in legacy media.