Negotiating futures in socio-technical controversies in the media: strategies of opinion orientation

Despite ever-repeated claims to objectivity and factuality, the media play a key role in setting political agendas and influencing public opinion (McCombs 2004). This is especially evident in the case of scientific controversies carrying crucial policy implications (Nelkin 1992³), where the media become the privileged loci for the enactment of discursive struggles, effectively contributing to shaping the way in which policy issues linked to science and technology debates are defined and symbolized (Nisbet et al. 2003; Nisbet 2014). One such controversy is the debate about hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, a novel extraction technique capable of retrieving shale gas trapped in deep layers of rocks. The study explores the way in which fracking was presented in selected UK press media over an 18-month timespan going from January 1, 2014 to June 30, 2015, with a view to identifying the linguistic, rhetorical and textual devices through which evaluation is conveyed in them either implicitly or explicitly. The study is discourse analytical in focus and adopts a multimethod approach, relying on analytical tools drawn from a variety of methodological frameworks in order to identify and describe (mainly) implicit evaluative patterns used within the context of a highly politically charged socio-technical controversy.