Constructing Climate Responsibility: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Climate Change Narratives in Pakistani News Media

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20371061

Abstract

Pakistan is a climate change hotspot and suffers from severe impacts of climate change including catastrophic flooding in monsoon 2022 and frequent winter smog. But, as severe as these threats may sound, the media at home still have a structurally inconsistent and linguistically split construction of climate responsibility. In this research, a mixed methods approach is used, combining the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) by Ruth Wodak with a Marxist political economy lens, and visual grammar analysis, to critically analyze the process of either passing on or pointing away the climate responsibility in the Pakistani news media. The analysis of the multilingual print, digital and broadcast archives in English and Urdu (2022-2025) shows the public sphere to be very fractured. Thematic criticism based on policy is given more weightage by elite English language outlets, as opposed to episodic, sensationalized and religious fatalistic narratives given greater weightage by mass-circulation Urdu outlets. The media takes part in systematically shifting its responsibility upwards to the Global North (Topos of Global Injustice) or downwards to the marginalised citizen (Topos of Individual Responsibility). Moreover, as the political-economic analysis reveals, there is “hegemonic silence” in the media sector, in which media companies bound by state advertising and by the massive advertising and greenwashing of companies and institutions in their own physical environment actively insulate the domestic industrial and political elites from any structural responsibility. Finally, the study suggests that linguistic integration, de-commercialization of environmental beats, and that rigorous ecolinguistic auditing of corporate greenwashing in Global South be implemented.  

Keywords: Climate Change Communication, Critical Discourse Analysis, Political Economy of Media, Greenwashing, Environmental Journalism, Global South, Pakistan.