Regulating Poverty: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Media Reporting on Energy Elite

Abstract

The current discursive development of renewable energy in news media is toward a direction of hyper-commodification, in which the process of creating a commodity is mainly subject to dominant political ideologies rather than a free market. Regarding the process of media reporting on global leaders’ renewable energy policies to the global public, I utilized semantic network analysis and discourse historical analysis to explore the process of hyper-commodification in media narratives. I found that media discourse constructs an illusion when representing renewable energy as essential and affordable in people’s everyday lives and indeed portrays a future without poverty. The underlying statement is that renewable energy is the future if you can afford it. Such discourses reimagine commodification by producing an emergent social class and intensifying the ongoing class warfare through the use of language. Although seeking solutions to implementing renewable energy is key to the public interest, the urgency of having a sustainable plan for energy consumption is often omitted from current media discourse. Instead, such discourses that represent the social reality retrospectively transition from reflecting public interests to only those of well-limited social groups can lead to detrimental consequences for successfully implementing sustainable goals in a timely manner.