Participation and Emotion in BBC Online News and Blogposts: A Snapshot on Climate Change

Abstract

The present study focuses on expressions of emotion in online news and blogs and the way in which they contribute to shaping the co-construction of information about an issue of public concern (more specifically the environmental issue) and the discoursal identities of participant communities. The theoretical framework of analysis is based on recent developments in discourse studies and appraisal theory on language about emotions. The corpus of data (BBC online articles and readers’ comments) have been analysed adapting the classification system of affect-types elaborated by Bednarek (2008). However limited, the data offer interesting and unexpected insights into participation to news construction and user-generated content: the way in which news and information are reported (the mediated ‘narrative’) elicits more language about emotion and concern than the central issue at stake (the environmental problem).