The hegemony of anthropocentric discourse on environmental news in Indonesian digital media: An ecolinguistic study based on big data corpus

Abstract

Background: Anthropocentric discourse positions humans as the supreme subject whose needs must be fulfilled. This benefactive role legitimizes the exclusion of humans as those responsible for destructive actions. This study explores how media, as an information channel, constructs anthropocentric dominance in environmental news in Indonesia. Methods: The research applies a mixed-method design with a corpus-assisted ecolinguistic approach. The data consist of text collections from Indonesian digital media compiled into a big data corpus using Sketch Engine (8,516,967,257 tokens). The data were collected through scraping and analyzed through critical discourse analysis. Findings: The findings reveal that the lexeme “lingkungan” (environment) appears 3,498,824 times or 492.18 occurrences per one million words. The data are classified into seven categories, with five main ones filtered using the highest logDice scores to determine collocation. From seventy-five collocates, ten lexemes from various categories (logDice 6.8–9.4) were selected for concordance pattern analysis. The concordance reading confirms the hegemony of anthropocentrism in environmental discourse. The media tend to assign responsibility to non-human entities or particular institutions. Some discourses also exhibit nominalization, implying that environmental problems are natural phenomena occurring without clear human agency. Several media even frame environmental issues as enemies to be fought by humans, when in fact, anthropogenic behavior triggers those issues. Other discourses emphasize human welfare over nature, suggesting that people will protect the environment only when it yields benefits. Conclusion: This nominalization obscures human activity as the root cause. The legitimized anthropogenic behavior reinforced by anthropocentric hegemony shapes public belief that human actions are not the central issue to be criticized. Novelty/Originality of this article: The limited exploration of how anthropocentrism shapes environmental discourse within large-scale media data.