Hypostatization and editorial choice in climate journalism: what journalists say and what they write

Abstract

When news coverage says that emissions drive warming or climate change displaces communities, the phrasing sounds neutral while it subtly writes the people behind it out of the story. The processes become the actors, while the polluters and decision-makers responsible for the harm slip out of view. Grammatically, this works by placing an abstraction in the subject position of an active verb, so that a process appears to act on its own. This article calls that effect “hypostatization”. The study examines how it shapes the language of climate journalism in the contemporary Anglo-American press. Drawing on interviews with six environmental journalists and corpus analysis of their published work alongside major outlets (NPR, CNN, The Conversation, and The New York Times), it traces how scientific vocabulary takes on evaluative weight as it enters public discourse and why even journalists who favor urgent terms like climate crisis keep using the established climate change so heavily. The analysis shows that this obliteration of responsibility happens mostly through ordinary, literal grammar rather than vivid metaphor: abstractions take the agent’s role through plain causative verbs far more often than figurative ones. Metaphor works alongside it as a parallel resource, since both draw on the same underlying sense of causes as forces, while softer terms like clean energy and carbon credits further dilute responsibility and emphasize technological fixes. By tracing how grammar, not just word choice, quietly redistributes agency and responsibility, the study contributes to ecolinguistics and critical discourse research.