<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<p>The final years of the 2010s marked an upturn in coverage on climate change. In Sweden, legacy media wrote more on the issue than ever before, especially in connection to the drought and wildfires in the summer of 2018 and the Fridays for Future movement started by Greta Thunberg. Reporting on climate change also reached unprecedented levels in the growingly influential far-right media ecosystem; from being a topic discussed hardly at all, it became a prominent issue. In this study, we use a toolkit from critical discourse analysis (CDA) to research how three Swedish far-right digital media sites reported on climate during the years 2018–2019. We show how the use of conspiracy theories, anti-establishment rhetoric, and nationalistic arguments created an antagonistic reaction to increased demands for action on climate change. By putting climate in ironic quotation marks, a discourse was created where it was taken for granted that climate change was a hoax.</p>
</abstract>

The final years of the 2010s marked an upturn in coverage on climate change. In Sweden, legacy media wrote more on the issue than ever before, especially in connection to the drought and wildfires in the summer of 2018 and the Fridays for Future movement started by Greta Thunberg. Reporting on climate change also reached unprecedented levels in the growingly influential far-right media ecosystem; from being a topic discussed hardly at all, it became a prominent issue. In this study, we use a toolkit from critical discourse analysis (CDA) to research how three Swedish far-right digital media sites reported on climate during the years 2018–2019. We show how the use of conspiracy theories, anti-establishment rhetoric, and nationalistic arguments created an antagonistic reaction to increased demands for action on climate change. By putting climate in ironic quotation marks, a discourse was created where it was taken for granted that climate change was a hoax.

Scare-quoting climate: The rapid rise of climate denial in the Swedish far-right media ecosystem

Division of STS at the Department of Technology, Management and Economics

Nordic Journal of Media Studies

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The final years of the 2010s marked an upturn in coverage on climate change. In Sweden, legacy media wrote more on the issue than ever before, especially in...

Scare-quoting climate: The rapid rise of climate denial in the Swedish far-right media ecosystem

Publié en ligne: 06 juil. 2021

Pages: 79 - 95

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/njms-2021-0005

Mots clés
far right, climate change denial, scare-quotes, Greta Thunberg, digital media

© 2021 Kjell Vowles et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Figure 1

Scare-quoting climate: The rapid rise of climate denial in the Swedish far-right media ecosystem

Publié en ligne: 06 juil. 2021

Pages: 79 - 95

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/njms-2021-0005

Mots clésfar right, climate change denial, scare-quotes, Greta Thunberg, digital media

© 2021 Kjell Vowles et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Figure 1

Mots clés
far right, climate change denial, scare-quotes, Greta Thunberg, digital media