Unveiling the Impact of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): A Study of Environmental Misinformation and Mistrust in Online News Discourse

The current paper builds on existing literature to solidify its arguments and provide a broader understanding of the misinformation and mistrust in shaping reality and affecting environmental politics. It follows the relevant scientific discussion regarding the impact of misinformation on democratic progress, as well as the idea that different actors can employ problematic news information to create dominant constructions that will shape reality and realize their political ambitions. Misinformation and mistrust towards political institutions and the media are some of the major problems that contribute to a form of new regimes that employ some democratic procedures to mask themselves as democracies, but they still exercise an autocratic logic that restricts different opinions, maintaining a dominant knowledge that cannot be challenge. In such a process, the misinformation stories empower the readers’ ideological characteristics, such as the positive depiction of the group they belong to (ingroup) and the others (outgroup) that are usually portrayed as a threat. According to the existing Securitization Theory (ST) literature, every object can become a security threat, demanding and justifying extreme actions to terminate the threat. This process of communication reveals a weaponization of information. However, despite the urgency of the environmental problems, we see that the ideological constructions of the major news outlets and the governmental constructions have failed to lead to urgent and immediate actions that favor the environment. Therefore, how do misinformation and trust disseminated through prominent media outlets’ ideological constructions influence reality? The paper uses ideological discourse analysis (IDA) to provide insights into this research question. It studies one of the larger infrastructure projects in humanity’s history, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), by analyzing the related news stories from four influential news outlets, China Daily, Global Times, Euronews and Euractiv, via the keyword “BRI and Environmental Problems” to investigate how these news stories compete with each other supporting polarization and promoting ideological constructions, such as positive representation of the ingroup versus the outgroup (us versus them), dramatizations, and fallacies to empower an inevitable reality that harms the environment. The results shed light on environmental misinformation stories and their ideological constructions, which affect global politics and the economy through the understanding of the BRI and its impact on the environment. They show that these news stories can lead to a polarized reality that highlights mostly the political characteristics and management of BRI rather than its environmental impact and influence in global governance.