Bag for Good?

A CDA of News Media and Popular Discourse on Lightweight Plastic Bags Ban in Australia

Abstract

In order to reduce unnecessary plastic usage, most Australian states have banned lightweight plastic bags. In the non-regulated jurisdictions, the two supermarkets Coles and Woolworths self-imposed a ban, encountering customers’ rebellion against the end of the free bag era. The chains initially seemed to surrender to a slower transition to reusable bags, causing further protests by environmentalists. The present paper investigates the recontextualisation of the environmental and legal issue of the single-use plastic bags ban in news media and user- generated discourse. The study analyses a collection of articles published by two of the major Australian online news outlets, News.com.au and Sydney Morning Herald, in 2017 and 2018 and the comments they generated. A corpus-assisted CDA aims at identifying the way actors and facts are framed in news discourse and user comments, also examining the linguistic means used by readers to express their position about the newspaper’s views and to support environmentalist or consumerist positions.