Unmasking Media Bias through Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies: A Corpus-Assisted Analysis of Keywords, Collocations, and Semantic Prosody in Newspaper Editorials Representing 'Climate Change' Policy

Abstract

The paper uses Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) to examine the media bias in newspaper editorials that report on climate change policy in ideologically different publications. This study uses systematic study of keywords, collocations, and semantic prosody to explore how language decisions create specific stories about climate policy, which may have an impact on the attitude of society and political rhetoric. The compilation of a specialized corpus of 2,847 editorials of six major newspapers (including 3 liberal-leaning and 3 conservative-leaning newspapers) published between 2020 and 2024 contained about 1.2 million words. Through corpus linguistic tools such as AntConc and Sketch Engine, the research examined frequency lists, comparison of keywords, collocational patterns and concordance lines to determine systematic variation in the way climate change policy is framed at both ends of the ideological spectrum. The results indicate that there are great differences in lexical decision, assessive language and semantic associations. Keywords that are specifically focused on the concept of crisis, urgency, and scientific consensus, collocations focused on economic opportunities and moral imperatives, are applied in liberal-leaning newspapers the most frequently. Publications with conservative leanings prefer such terms as debate, unpredictability, and economic effects, and collocations such as foregrounding costs, regulations, and skepticism. The analysis of semantic prosody shows that the same terms related to climate have very different evaluative connotations in accordance with the ideological direction of the publication. The work helps to comprehend the role of media discourse on the development of climate policy discussions and provides methodological details of the implementation of CADS as the means of exploring the issue of ideological positioning in modern journalism. The implications of these findings on media literacy and communication about climate and the place of journalism in democratic debate on environmental policy.