ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a critical discourse analysis of the Calgary Herald’s coverage of the bitumen industry during 2015. This newspaper constructs the concept “oil sands” and its associated bitumen industry through a series of semantic prosodies and discursive tactics. At the phrasal level, the newspaper understated the fact that the oil sands are a type of unconventional and toxic petroleum deposit and defined the bitumen industry as an indispensable component for economic stability in Alberta and Canada. At the discursive level, the newspaper implemented the strategies of “binary construction” and “appeal to inevitability” to ideologically enclose viable alternatives that challenge the bitumen industry’s dominance. Through these tactics, the Herald advocated the idea that the governments of both Alberta and Canada should function as petro-states to ensure the expansion of the bitumen industry. Discursive legitimation of the bitumen industry is shifting from “persuasion” to “manipulation,” with more covert discursive tactics appearing in the public sphere. Accordingly, struggles over discursive space and power become a crucial frontier of environmental politics.
