“Climate change” is a term that evokes a range of emotions in different people – from urgency and concern to skepticism and fatigue. How people respond to a term like this depends largely on the context in which they encounter it – especially in the media.

News outlets play a significant role in shaping public opinion and, ultimately, influencing political decisions. The way climate change is talked about in the media can impact how audiences understand and engage with the issue. By analyzing large volumes of news articles, researchers can measure how discourses evolve over time and identify dominant narratives.

This kind of research uses a method called corpus linguistics – and it helps us better understand how public discourse is evolving. Mathew Gillings is an Assistant Professor at the WU Institute for English Business Communication and has specialized in this area of linguistic research.

In a recent study, he and his colleague Carmen Dayrell from Lancaster University analyzed a corpus of British newspaper articles published in the period from 2003 to 2019 that contained terms like “climate change” or “global warming.” In total, they analyzed about 125,000 texts equating to almost 90 million words – and they could identify distinct phases that the discourse around climate change has gone through over the years.

In our new “Meet Our Researchers” video, Mathew Gillings explains how this discourse has evolved over time and what these findings mean for us as media consumers. After wrapping up, he also took the time to answer a few questions about his work at WU.

Your main field of research is corpus linguistics. How did you get into this field?

As a linguist, I’ve always wanted to understand how language is actually used in the real world. Corpus linguistics allows you to do just that by analyzing authentic texts rather than relying purely on intuition. Approaching language analysis in this way is the opposite of what’s often called “armchair linguistics”, where you theorize about language from a purely abstract perspective. Language is a lens into human behavior – it helps us understand how and why people act and communicate in the way that they do in different contexts.

Your latest study examines climate change in the media. What have you personally learned from this?

One of the most interesting things was how the media try to maintain balance in their reporting. They often present both skeptical and scientific perspectives on climate change, but the more you analyze it, the clearer it becomes that those skeptical voices often gain disproportionate traction. This is something we need to think critically about.

During the publication process, we received feedback suggesting that our study might come across as portraying climate skeptics as “bad” and climate scientists as “good”. But that wasn’t our intention at all. People absorb and reproduce discourses that they’ve been exposed to, and rather than attacking individuals, we need to examine where these narratives come from and how they spread.

If you could give journalists one piece of advice on reporting climate change, what would it be?

Have faith in the academic system and the peer-review process. And when articles feature an expert, trust in that expert’s experience and knowledge. Scientists aren’t infallible, but the process of scientific inquiry is rigorous for a reason, and it’s important to acknowledge that.