En Miljøhistorisk Diskursanalyse af Atomkraftdebatten i Danmark, 2000-2017

Studenteropgave: Kandidatspeciale og HD afgangsprojekt

  • Anders Hald Holdensen
4. semester, Historie, Kandidat (Kandidatuddannelse)
The following Master’s thesis examines how the three Danish news outlets, Jyllands-Posten (JP), Information and Danmarks Radio (DR) write and communicate about nuclear power in the period 2000-2017. The purpose of the thesis is to explore whether or not the Danish nuclear discourse has developed since the Danish parliament’s decision to remove nuclear power from its energy plan in 1985. The thesis makes a special distinction in time before and after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which serves to examine how the news outlets changes their discourse based on the disaster. Data from more than 500 articles on nuclear power have been collected and analyzed, which serves as the primary knowledge that the thesis base its conclusion on. From these 500 articles, nine have been chosen as representative for the overall discourse and analytical process. These nine articles are thoroughly analyzed in the thesis, with another two articles to be found in the appendix. The analysis of these articles are based on the following theory: Norman Fairclough (Critical Discourse Analysis), Donald Worster (Environmental History), John S. Dryzek (Environmental discourses) and Oluf Danielsen (the Danish nuclear debate). Fairclough’s CDA is chosen as the main framework for the thesis because it examines discourse on three key levels: the textual dimension, the discursive practice dimension and the social practice dimension. Worster serves both as justification for the thesis, but also as the main theoretical framework for the choice of articles. Dryzek and Danielsen serves the same purpose, which is to provide knowledge on both environmental and nuclear discourses, which in turn is compared to the findings of the analysis. The thesis also contains an analysis on 399 headlines from JP’s articles on nuclear power, with the purpose of proving how headlines influences the discursive process. The thesis finds that the Danish state owned news outlet DR, and the politically independent Information, both reproduces the leading Danish nuclear discourse. The Liberal newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, is more complex but is largely mimicking the nuclear discourse of large international organizations, such as IEA and UNFCCC before Fukushima, but changes its discourse after the disaster to a more hostile stance towards nuclear power. Furthermore, the thesis finds that the period 2000-2017 clearly contains three distinct periods with different nuclear discourses; the first period lasts roughly from 2000-2003, the second from 2004-2010, and the last from 2011-2017.
SprogDansk
Udgivelsesdato31 maj 2018
Antal sider82
ID: 280217162