Climates of risk: a field analysis of global climate change in US media discourse, 1997-2004.

How are industry and environmentalist discourses of climate risk related to dominant scientific and political discourses? This study operationalizes Bourdieu's concept of symbolic capital in order to map dimensions of risk description and prescription onto a journalistic field of industry, environmentalist, scientific, and political media. Results show that conventional definitions of risk mirror an opposition between scientific and political discourses. Prescriptions for action on risk are partly autonomous from definitions however. Environmentalist and scientific media feature more proactive discourse, and industry and political media feature more reactive discourse. Implications for future research on climate risk and relational studies of media discourse are discussed.