TY - JOUR

T1 - Orchestration of perspectives in televised climate change debates

AU - Nielsen, Søren Beck

PY - 2023

Y1 - 2023

N2 - Previous research has tied the journalistic norm of ‘balance’ to an overarching tendency to polarize the climate debate between realists and contrarians. This study uses conversation analysis to advance our knowledge about how climate changes are debated verbally in practice. It builds upon a corpus of current televised climate change panel debates in Denmark. The corpus confirms a documented turn from debating if global warming is a fact to debating what we should do to reduce emissions. Analyses detail two methods, which the interviewer invokes to administer turn-taking: (a) stand-alone next speaker reference and (b) prefatory address term + interrogatives that implicitly project disagreement. These methods help interviewers sustain their formal neutrality. But the study also finds that perspectives are orchestrated to (re)produce multiple polarizations between representatives of different interests and ideologies, for example activists versus business representatives, which might not be helpful in solving the climate crisis.

AB - Previous research has tied the journalistic norm of ‘balance’ to an overarching tendency to polarize the climate debate between realists and contrarians. This study uses conversation analysis to advance our knowledge about how climate changes are debated verbally in practice. It builds upon a corpus of current televised climate change panel debates in Denmark. The corpus confirms a documented turn from debating if global warming is a fact to debating what we should do to reduce emissions. Analyses detail two methods, which the interviewer invokes to administer turn-taking: (a) stand-alone next speaker reference and (b) prefatory address term + interrogatives that implicitly project disagreement. These methods help interviewers sustain their formal neutrality. But the study also finds that perspectives are orchestrated to (re)produce multiple polarizations between representatives of different interests and ideologies, for example activists versus business representatives, which might not be helpful in solving the climate crisis.

U2 - 10.1177/09579265221117015

DO - 10.1177/09579265221117015

M3 - Journal article

VL - 34

SP - 175

EP - 191

JO - Discourse & Society

JF - Discourse & Society

SN - 0957-9265

IS - 2

ER -