(Re)framing Climate Change in a Climate Sceptic Online News Outlet

This paper centres on how climate change is framed in The Daily Wire, one of the most popular American right-wing alternative media outlets and one of the leading news sources of climate sceptical views in the US at the time of writing. Corpus-assisted discourse analysis methodologies and semantic analysis are applied to the study of the 376 articles published about climate change in The Daily Wire from 2018 to 2021. Specifically, it investigates the themes and concepts that the outlet made most salient and the ways in which framing devices (tags, titles, and visuals) and discursive strategies were used to articulate frames within these articles. The main topics and themes that emerge in the semantic analysis suggest that The Daily Wire provided a largely unbiased and objective account of climate change, but the analysis of comparative keywords and framing devices provides a contrasting view of how the issue and its advocates were presented. The Daily Wire equated environmentalism to religion, exploited frames identified as diminishing people’s propensity to support climate action, and focused on the faults in the characters and experiences of leading (female) climate activists. The findings of this study can help glean insights into the discursive mechanisms that govern the advancement of climate scepticism and other antagonistic ideologies to conservative audiences.