VertigO ()
Figures et importance de l’« expertise environnementale » dans la presse écrite
Abstract
On questions regarding environmental governance, experts are required and frequently used by decision-makers, whether at the municipal, provincial, federal or at the local level. Hydrogeologists, engineers, in some cases climatologists, lawyers and others are called for to help people figure out what they can and should do in determinate situations. In our democratic societies, the media also play a part by giving information to the general public user as well as for decision makers, even with the existence of the internet. We present here and analyze a corpus of articles that have been selected through the whole year 2009, in La Presse, Le Devoir and Le Soleil, important daily newspapers in Québec province. After having treated elsewhere the whole of the articles referring to University and public research experts on all issues, we devote our attention here to a significant part of the sub-corpus of papers, those treating of questions of environmental governance : water, climate, energy problems and others. After having given an introductory set of remarks to discuss expertise issues in the context of public opinion building, we present the corpus, discuss the relative importance of the themes treated by the pieces, then discuss the relative importance of the descriptive, the evaluative and the prescriptive modes of discourse in the articles. We then show how the articles align themselves overall or not on the position of the experts referred to in the given articles, providing both quantitative and qualitative elements to see the relative magnitude and meaning of the phenomenon in the contemporary situation.
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