I carried out my discourse analysis on the Calgary Herald. This paper has been chosen for examination because Calgary is the largest metropolitan area in the province and it is also the epicenter of Canada’s energy industry. Over two thirds of Calgary’s 124 head offices operate within the energy and oilfield services sector (https://www.calgaryeconomicdevelopment.com/industries/focus-areas/energy CITE) Given the fact that oil plays such a prominent role in the city, it is expected that part of the readership of the most widely read newspaper in the city will be made up of people who are key players in public discourse on oil and the environment in Calgary. The Herald is the larger of two daily broadsheet papers in the city and reaches over …show more content…
I was curious to see exactly how many articles from my randomly generated sample of 282 articles would place emphasis on the economy or climate change itself. The best way to address this question was to code for when each topic would appear in the data. Articles did not have to explicitly mention the words “economy” or “adaptation” to be included in the count for I was able to easily deduce the implied context of the article. As an example, an article’s headline reads, “Study finds Canada loses if world keeps ‘carbon budget'.” Even a quick glance over this article would reveal that it is about the energy economy in Canada and its benefits to the national GDP. I went through all 50 articles and first coded for business or economic matters that appeared. The article would be tallied if it made mention of topics surrounding oil, gas, coal, pipelines, manufacturing or even renewables. I paid close attention for specific words that would appear such as business, company, economy, financial, fiscal, free market, industry, industrial relations, corporation, organization, company, market, economist, economics, trading, profits, growth, losses etc. Next, I coded for instances of writing about adaptation and mitigation strategies arose in the data set. Again, the words “adapt” or “mitigate” did not necessarily have to appear in the text to be categorized as writing about reducing the effects of climate change. I looked for specific words deriving from adaptation and mitigation such as solution, action, reduction, cap, limit, cut, etc. As an example, an article titled “Creating an Alberta advantage; province should profit from renewable resources” was coded as part of the adaptation category because of its claims about Alberta becoming a leader in diversification. Interestingly enough, this article was also counted as part of the