Open Collections

Reeve, Brianna

University of British Columbia

In 2023, Canada experienced one of the worst wildfire seasons in its history, with over 16.5 million hectares of land being burnt. These record-breaking wildfires required evacuations, posed physical and mental health risks, and required multiple levels of government emergency response. As wildfires have become increasingly intense, scientists have come to the consensus that climate change is a factor which is contributing to the worsening of these fires through increased global temperatures, changing seasonal patterns, and increased droughts. Media coverage of the wildfires combined event-driven reporting and climate journalism. Climate journalism has been an area of rapid change in journalism studies. Climate journalism has been moving away from previous ideas of objectivity and bothsidesism, and instead moving towards a subjective stance where climate change is not treated as a subjective ideal, but is instead treated as an objective fact, changing the way that different voices in climate journalism are represented. Climate journalism aligns with journalistic sourcing practices as certain groups, such as government officials, receive high media representation, and other groups experience less representation. This research project explored how different sources are represented in the 2023 Canadian wildfire media coverage, using both quantitative and qualitative analysis. It investigated which sources were the most likely to assert a connection between climate change and wildfires, and to understand how reluctance and skepticism are represented. Findings suggest that skeptic voice presence in media is decreasing, and that event-driven crisis reporting platforms a microcosm of dominant government sources. The results advance an understanding of how science communication is represented by sources, and which sources contribute to shaping the current representation of climate change in the media during a crisis event.

Text

2024-04-19

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87897

Journalism

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/