Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article takes as its departure point the questions ‘Which discourses figure in the news media’s coverage of natural disasters?’ and ‘What are the possible unintended consequences of this type of crisis communication?’ The overall aim is to elucidate the development of risk discourses, struggles over discursive legitimacy, and shifts in argumentation to legitimate or delegitimate certain actors and actions in relation to a widespread and devastating wildfire in the summer of 2014 in Sweden. The chosen media outlets are one national agenda-setting morning newspaper, one national evening tabloid, and one local newspaper. All coverage in these newspapers from the period of the wildfire were selected and analyzed. By employing a critical discourse analysis of three different newspapers’ crisis communication flows during the one-month-long wildfire, we show how crisis communication is in fact embedded in discourses of power related to gender and rurality.