The objective of this article is to analyze the occurrences of the lemma ‘water’ within Japanese and German newspaper articles regarding the release of wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The work was carried out with the aid of two corpora built with the software NooJ and containing news on the subject extracted from the online database of six newspapers, Asahi Shinbun and Yomiuri Shinbun for Japanese, Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Der Spiegel and Die Welt for German. Through both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the headword and the constituents positioned to its left and right, it was possible to delineate two trends in the description of the release, portrayed either as harmless or dangerous thanks to precise linguistic choices and communicative strategies. The results constitute a step forward in establishing the role of media in influencing public opinion concerning the ever-present and highly politicized debate on the safety of atomic energy.
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Lisa Pezzali (2024) studied this question.
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