A Comparative Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of News about the 2024 Valencia Floods: The Guardian vs. The Daily Mail

The environmental crisis has occupied the pages of newspapers worldwide, echoed by concerned climate scientists calling for immediate intervention to prevent further damage to the planet. This raises one question, namely how newspapers navigate this responsibility and the specific discursive strategies used to frame environmental disasters for their readers. This master’s thesis employs the Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) framework to investigate the reportage of the Valencia floods in October 2024 in the British press. The study conducts a comparative analysis between two British newspapers, The Guardian and the Daily Mail, resulting in a total of 34 articles (17 from each publication). Through Machin and Mayr’s MCDA model, supported by the corpus analysis tool AntConc for article categorisation, this research examines how the event was framed by the two newspapers by focusing on linguistic features as well as visual features in images and their interplay with textual elements. The findings of our analysis indicate that while the visual framing of the event demonstrates a degree of similarity across the two newspapers, a significant divergence in their linguistic choices is evident. The linguistic analysis reveals that The Guardian consistently contextualises the disaster within the broader climate crisis, using epistemic modality to present scientific consensus on climate changes as induced by humans’ behaviour and action and war metaphors to advocate for urgent actions. In contrast, The Daily Mail prioritises a narrative focused on immediate chaos and human tragedy, often distancing itself from attributing systemic or climatic causes – even addressing conspiracy theories. While the visual analysis finds a convergent focus on depicting material destruction and the collective efforts of emergency responders, the framing reinforces the newspapers’ distinct approaches: The Guardian’s focus is on resilience and reconstruction of the towns affected by the flood, while the Daily Mail’s pictures focus on showing the scale of the disaster. This disparity reveals contrasting ideological positions and strategies for framing political responsibility for the disaster, as well as acknowledgement of the role that climate change played in the event.