Stop Adani

Risk Communication and Legal Mining Conflicts in Australian Media Discourse

Abstract

The evaluation of environmental risk often leads to conflict and legal disputes. Legal verdicts and actions are in turn mediated by news media, which call lay people to think about them either as active participants or interested observers. During the last decade, new media have intensified their role as a channel for thecommunication of legal discourse regarding environmental risk and conflict. The spreading of news across ‘genre chains’, is central to the present study on the evaluation of mining legal disputes and climate change risks in new media. The article provides an analysis of the recontextualisation and appraisal of legal discourse in a media genre chain regarding the Stop Adani legal action campaign network against the instalment of a coal megamine in central Queensland. The analysis was carried out by analysing a corpus (2014-2018), specifically compiled to represent different interrelated discourse genres. The data is analyzed according to an approach which draws upon findings in Critical Discourse Analysis, Appraisal Linguistics, and Corpus Linguistics. Accordingly, it situates quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis within a wider analytical framework which includes extra-linguistic social variables.