Climate Hypocrisies: a Comparative Study of News Discourse

This paper conducts a comparative study of how the idea of hypocrisy was invoked in media coverage of climate change in twelve newspapers from four countries (Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, United States) between 2005 and 2015. It develops the concepts, and explores the characteristics, of three distinct types of climate hypocrisy: personalized (which attacks the moral character of individuals based upon inconsistencies between their stated beliefs and behaviour); institutional-analytic (which identifies contradictions between institutional rhetoric and ongoing policies and practices); and reflexive (which develops sympathetic accounts of the struggles individuals face in reconciling the tension between values and actions). It explores how these types are used to undermine the credibility of climate advocates as well as to argue for more aggressive climate action, and maps out key features of climate hypocrisy discourse including ideological attributes, targeted actors and behaviours, affective intensity and regional variations. It outlines a number of surprising key findings, including (i) that hypocrisy discourses are more frequently invoked by ‘progressives’ supporting climate change action than by ‘conservatives’ resisting climate change action, and (ii) that while both groups use hypocrisy discourse, they tend to use very different types of hypocrisy discourses which each likely have very different impacts on climate change discourse..