Climate concerns “under the rubble”: Discursive portrayal of Turkey-Syria earthquake

A significant amount of research exists on how the media cover environmental disasters and thus articulate climate concerns. However, there is a lack of studies on how news media outlets discursively presented the 2023 earthquake that took place in Turkey and Syria. To address the existing gap, the study seeks to investigate how the selected news media vocalised the climate concerns during the seismic event. For this purpose, we scrutinised the news pieces published by prominent news outlets. The study implemented mixed-methods tools to correlate the specific climate concerns and their representation. We qualitatively examined the obtained keywords earthquake, quake, and rubble, focusing on nomination and predication strategies employed for their discursive framing. Our research reveals a general trend exhibited by the three media outlets to place their discursive emphasis on a more immediate scale of repercussions (casualties, destruction, rescue efforts). The more global, climate-related issues might require more attention.