MEDIA ECOLOGIES: AN ECOLINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF CNN WEATHER REPORTS

Abstract

This study examines how weather events are represented in CNN’s 2024 coverage through the lens of ecolinguistics, with five selected stories from Stibbe’s (2021) stories we live by framework: narrative, metaphor, framing, evaluation, and erasure. The corpus consists of 250 weather reports and total 108, 215 words. The data was selected through purposive sampling to ensure coverage of diverse events such as hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and heatwaves. Manual thematic coding was combined with keyword frequency analysis using AntConc version 4.3.1 (Anthony, 2024), and the results were visualized through Microsoft Excel (2025) to identify discourse patterns. The findings reveal a dominant event-based narrative structure, frequent use of militaristic and anthropomorphic metaphors, and framing that prioritizes human and economic impacts over ecological concerns. Evaluative language emphasizes human loss, while erasure of climate change attribution and environmental consequences is present in the majority of reports. These results highlight the need for more ecologically integrated reporting that foregrounds systemic climate connections and environmental impacts alongside human-centered narratives. Implications are discussed for improving public understanding of weather within the context of the climate crisis.