As techno-environmental controversies increasingly confront us with tremendous democratic challenges, it is imperative to investigate which discursive strategies and processes in media discourses facilitate or impede democratic debate and citizenship. This paper puts forward an approach combining the risk conflicts perspective with the analytical framework of critical discourse analysis to analyse how two Belgian elite newspapers discursively (re-)define and interpret four controversial events in the debate on genetically modified crops and food. The analysis identifies two distinct ideological cultures. Driven by an unproblematized idea of scientific consensus, one ideological culture is found to repeatedly take up the defence of the status quo and to continuously enact processes of de-politicization to impede democratic debate. The other is found to facilitate democratic debate by repeatedly challenging existing power relations, in terms of revealing competing sets of assumptions, values and interests underlying opposing responses to scientific uncertainty.
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