The Erasure Story in Weather Reports: An Ecolinguistic Analysis

Abstract

This analysis examines ‘erasure stories’ in the weather reports of BBC, CNN, DW, Al Jazeera, and GNN. A sample of 500 news reports (total tokens 119,564) on weather-related topic were collected. It employs Arran Stibbe’s (2015) ‘Stories We Live By’ framework. The analysis is based the concept of the ‘Erasure Story’. For the quantitative analysis, AntConc version 4.3.1 (Anthony, 2024) is used to identify the presence and absence of key ecological terminology, such as ‘climate change’, ‘ecosystem’, ‘biodiversity’, and ‘carbon emissions’. The results indicate prevailing trends of lexical and thematic omission especially in CNN and GNN where ecological factors of climatic event are left out. Though DW and Al Jazeera had higher inclusion of environmental terminologies, even their report was not consistent. The paper classifies the erasure as of typology of void, trace, and mask (Stibbe, 2015) which is justified by presence of concordance evidence, lexical visualization, and instance of erasure. Such patterns represent an anthropocentric approach, which silences an agency of nature and conceals underpinning causes of environmental crises. The study has expanded the use of the ‘Erasure Story’ to one of the commonly used genres i.e. weather reporting. It shows how pressing the need is of ecologically attentive media discourse that is centered about environmental causality.