Building bonds and reader engagement through positive environmental journalism: Ideological positioning and ecocultural affiliation

Recent research shows a growing audience preference for hopeful, solutions- based content that reconnects humanity with nature and fosters ecocultural identification and affiliation. The way in which journalistic discourse actively enacts these affiliative bonds and fosters reader compassionate engagement, however, remains underexplored – an area to which this article contributes. This study addresses two questions: (1) How does positive environmental journalism (PEJ) foster compassionate engagement and ethical agency among audiences? (2) Through what rhetorical strategies does it construct ecocultural bonds and ideologically position audiences? Drawing on positive discourse analysis of compassion (e.g. Etaywe, 2024), the Appraisal framework (e.g. White, 2025), affiliation theory (Bednarek & Martin, 2010), convergence/divergence principles (Giles, 2016) and the concept of ecocultural identification (Milstein & Castro-Sotomayor, 2020), we analyse 30 articles from ABC News Online, Guardian Australia, and news.com.au. Findings reveal that PEJ employs strategic evaluative couplings, ideological positioning, and positive versus negative bond clustering to construct new ways of meaning that encourage convergence with pro-environmental practices and divergence from harmful norms, and construct futures-oriented narratives centred on care, solidarity, and ecological responsibility. These linguistic choices also construe a reality of deontology—a moral framing where readers are positioned as ethically responsible agents of compassionate intervention, and their actions are not just encouraged but commodified as ethical currency in the civic marketplace. By activating ecocultural affiliations and mobilising hope inextricably from sociocultural moral orders of care, PEJ offers a powerful alternative to fear-driven reporting. It fosters responsibility and human–nature reconciliation, thereby offering a constructive, ethically grounded mode of positive environmental communication.