The Rhetoric of Climate Change Communications: An Analysis of Articles from the New York Times and Fox News over a 25 Year Period

This paper is a rhetorical content analysis of the use of certain rhetorical devices (those being imagery, personification, congeries, metaphor and simile, conceptual metaphors, and allusion) by the New York Times and Fox News at five year increments over a 25 year period between the years of 1994 and 2019. The paper seeks to answer the following questions: Which rhetorical devices do the media use to communicate information about climate change? How have the rhetorical devices changed over time (since the advent of the internet to today)? How do rhetorical devices differ between publications with different political leanings (and therefore with different methods of framing information), and by extension, between those with different approaches to writing about climate change? This paper finds that imagery visualizes abstract data or depicts natural beauty, personification portrays the natural world as both a victim and an aggressor, congeries convey a multitude of weather chaos, metaphor and simile are used to explain scientific concepts, conceptual metaphors depict climate change as a war between humans and the natural world, and allusions are used for making connections, for emotional effect, for putting the climate situation into a historic perspective.