I can’t make it to Climate Camp as I’ve got a couple of deadlines approaching for a book chapter and article (both on climate change–reasonable excuse?) But to do my bit I’m going to try and monitor the language that the media uses to report on activities at the camp.
I’ll look at the different ways in which the actors and claims-makers are treated in the media. As John Richardson says in his book Analysing Newspapers, “Successive studies of journalism have shown that there is often social or ideological significance between the choices” of how subjects are treated by the media (Richardson 2007, 56). In particular, the level of agency given to the actors in a particular situation–how are they described, how are their actions described, are they given or deleted agency?
So far, what seems to be the pattern is that the Climate Camp attendees and protesters are given full agency as the subjects of the stories. That is, it is very, almost clinically, clear that what follows will be fully their responsibility. For example, from Kevin Dowling at the TimesOnline:
Climate change activists have threatened to break the law as they gather this weekend for a week-long protest camp at the proposed site of a new coal-fired power station.
The protesters aim to shut down the coal-fired plant already in operation on the site at Kingsnorth, Kent, and block the construction of the new £1.5 billion facility.
The transitivity of the verbs for the activists and protesters is active and with full agency (they are named, they have done or are doing, or aim to do).
Compare this to the Reuters story of the police raid on the camp:
Environmental campaigners accused police of aggressive tactics on Saturday as they prepared to protest German utility E.ON’s plans for Britain’s first new coal-fired power station in three decades.
Gathering at Kingsnorth in Kent for the August 9 protest, the Camp for Climate Action group said their plans to set up a site for the week-long demonstration were disrupted by a police raid on Thursday by up to 100 officers.
The action here was a police raid. But the full agency is not given to the police for the raid. Rather, it remains with the campaigners who ‘accuse’ and ‘say’. The police are the passive objects of the story. Later on in the story, the campaigner Mel Evans is desribed as being arrested, but the agency of the police in this action has been deleted:
Evans was one of 29 environmental protesters who were arrested [by who?] in June after occupying a train carrying coal to Britain’s biggest coal-fired power station at Snaith, just south of the Drax plant in Selby, North Yorkshire.
And if you think it might just be Reuters, here’s the BBC:
Police have come under fire at the start of a week-long protest camp against plans for a coal-fired power station in the Hoo peninsula in Kent.
Dramatic turnaround of transitivity and subject there–the police “under fire”. The headline is more vague: “Climate Camp policing criticized”. So not even the police, but their policing, so the result of the action, and not the actors themselves.
These are small matters in the grand scheme of things, but as Richardson says, “given that transitivity forms the very basis of representation, transitive choice cannot be overlooked in any linguistic analysis of journalism” (Richardson 2000, 57). Richardson also quotes Montgomery et al (2000, 92) whose research found that the Daily Mail, supportive of the Conservative government’s position, generally reported the police as the objects and victims in the 1983 Miners Strike.
And talking of small matters… Energy Minister Malcolm Wicks thinks it doesn’t matter what we do, as this one coal-powered station is ‘small fry’ compared to what China and India are doing:
Malcolm Wicks said that protesters were naive, as a single new plant in the UK would have a tiny impact compared to the rapid development of power generation in countries like China. “Our decisions about any one application for a coal plant in Britain are pretty small fry compared to the risk of global CO2 emissions in coming years.”
Government fatalism is the policy then. On the language: does Wicks think all protesters are “naive”? And did he actually say this word, or is it a summation by The Times, as it doesn’t come in quotes?
Perhaps my favourite juxtaposition so far of the different scales of the positions is from the BBC:
If approved, E.ON said the power station would be operational by 2012 and provide energy for 1.5 million homes.
[200] Protesters started to pitch tents outside the plant on Wednesday.
A day of direct action has been planned on Saturday which participants say will “shut down” the 2,000 megawatt plant which supplies electricity to 1.5 million homes in the South East. Kent Police said it has a £1m law enforcement budget. Officers on standby include mounted police from the City of London.
In the run-up to the camp, several “climate caravans” headed for Hoo – one group travelling through London in a caravan, dressed as penguins and polar bears.
Interesting how the 1.5m homes is repeated, and how ‘homes’ is contrasted with ‘tents’, and how a £1m budget and ‘mounted police’ is contrasted with ‘several’ caravans and campaigners dressed as ‘penguins and polar bears’. The juxtapostions and use of official language (law enforcement, officers, mounted police) contrasts starkly with the deligitimatized quotations around ‘climate caravans’ and the attention to the costumes of the protestors.
I’m not the only one watching the language. The sceptical blogger Tom Nelson seems to mock the passion of Chris Davies, the Lib Dem MEP for the North West, by bolding out sections of his comment piece that appeared in the Guardian earlier this week.
More coming over the week.
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Somethings gotta be done. We’re all gonna dieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
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