The fate of bitumen: an exploratory study of national newspaper coverage of Alberta’s bitumen industry during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

This exploratory study examines how three major Canadian newspapers—the Globe and Mail, the National Post, and the Toronto Star—reported on Alberta’s bitumen industry throughout 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic introduced significant market volatility. Through a combination of computational text analysis and qualitative interpretation, the study identified four recurring themes in 685 articles published by the target newspapers: (1) contention over bitumen infrastructure, (2) economic challenges for the bitumen industry, (3) political divide over the future of bitumen, (4) the bitumen industry’s environmental impacts. A further qualitative assessment of these themes indicates that despite the pandemic’s exposure of the structural weaknesses underlying Canada’s resource-dependent economy, voices supporting the bitumen industry continue to dominate Canadian mainstream newspapers.