Media Coverage Of Environmental Conservation Issues

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2015 in the subject Communications - Journalism, Journalism Professions, grade: 8.7, Kenyatta University (Media Technology and Advanced Communication), course: Bachelors: Mass communication and Journalism, language: English, abstract: Environmental issues represent a very low proportion of all stories covered by newspapers; these stories also suffer from content limitations. No coverage of environmental issues in the popular media is likely to be a straight forward treatment of the facts due to many practical constrains, some of which are inherent in the structure and values of modern news reporting. Some of these constrains are: misreporting or miscommunication, low levels of journalistic training in science reporting and writing, media time and space constrains and commercial pressures. The objectives guiding the study are: how regularly are environmental conservation stories published and why they are not published as regularly and with such prominence as other stories of political and entertainment nature. A descriptive survey design will be used. This involves content analysis per se primarily as a tool of data collection. Purposive sampling dictated the choice of THE DAILY NATION and THE STANDARD as newspapers whose content shall be analyzed. The selection of media outlets was based on popularity and the number of published copies and the rating of selected newspapers. The period under analysis will be between the month of May and June. Conservation and sustenance of the environment has become one of the pressing issues facing humanity today with environmental and conservation education and awareness being regarded as one of the measures of halting the conflict between human and nature. According to Canadian Environmental Grantmakers’ Network, solving today's challenging local and global environmental issues and moving society towards conservational efforts cannot rest only with “experts” but will require the support and active participation of an informed public in their various roles as consumers, voters, employers, and business and community leaders. Thus, mass media should become an indispensable partner in global conservation and management through their various roles of not only increasing awareness on the problems and challenges towards environmental conservation and sustainability.

The first in a new series, this presents a synthesis of current thinking and research on the role of the mass media in the rise of the environment as a social and political issue. It demonstrates the strengths of communications research in the analysis of social issues.

Environmental Risks and the Media explores the ways in which environmental risks, threats and hazards are represented, transformed and contested by the media. At a time when popular conceptions of the environment as a stable, natural world with which humanity interferes are being increasingly contested, the medias methods of encouraging audiences to think about environmental risks - from the BSE or 'mad cow' crisis to global climate change - are becoming more and more controversial. Examining large-scale disasters, as well as 'everyday' hazards, the contributors consider the tensions between entertainment and information in media coverage of the environment. How do the media frame 'expert', 'counter-expert' and 'lay public' definitions of environmental risk? What role do environmental pressure groups like Greenpeace or 'eco-warriors' and 'green guerrillas' play in shaping what gets covered and how? Does the media emphasis on spectacular events at the expense of issue-sensitive reporting exacerbate the public tendency to overestimate sudden and violent risks and underestimate chronic long-term ones?

Should environmental reporting offer advocacy or objectivity? How can the media explain complex issues of science and technology without oversimplifying? Does the prevailing definition of news limit the media's ability to report on the environment? Media and the Environment is the first book to explore these and other questions about how the media cover the environment.

Environmental journalism is an increasingly significant area for study within the broader field of journalism studies. It connects the concerns of politics, science, business, culture and the natural world whilst also exploring the boundaries between the local, regional and global. A central and typical focus for its concerns are the global summits convened to share scientific knowledge about global warming and to formulate policies to mitigate its consequences in particular locales. But reporting environmental change creates difficulties for journalists who are often ill equipped to resolve the uncertainties in the disputed scientific accounts of climate change. This research-based collection focuses on aspects of environmental journalism in Australia, France, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the USA. Contributors present case studies of media reporting of the environment, and explore considerations of objectivity and advocacy in journalistic coverage of the environment and climate change. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journalism Studies.

Drawing on a range of international examples, Libby Lester invites readers to develop a nuanced understanding of changing media practices and dynamics by connecting local, national and global environmental issues, journalistic practices and news sources, public relations and protests, and the symbolic and strategic circulation of meanings in the public sphere.

The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Journalism provides a thorough understanding of environmental journalism around the world. An increasing number of media platforms – from newspapers and television to Internet social media networks – are the major providers of indispensable information about the natural world and environmental risk. Despite the dramatic changes in the news industry that have tended to reduce the number of full-time newspaper reporters, environmental journalists remain key to bringing stories to light across the globe. With contributions from around the world broken down into five key regions – the United States of America, Europe and Russia, Asia and Australia, Africa and the Middle East, and South America – this book provides support for today’s environment reporters, the providers of essential news in the 21st century. As a scholarly and journalistic work written by academics and the environmental reporters themselves, this volume is an essential text for students and scholars of environmental communication, journalism, and global environmental issues more generally, as well as professionals working in this vital area.

This edited collection provides a unique survey of the ways in which news media organizations across Latin America and the Caribbean cover global, regional and local environmental issues and challenges. There is growing recognition within academia, governments, industries, NGOs and civil society about the importance of strategic communication and the news media in informing current societal and policy discussions about environmental issues. With this in mind, this volume explores the content of reporting as well as the structural and individual contests faced by media organizations and journalists, with a focus on the very unique political, social, cultural and environmental conditions that affect the countries individually. The book provides a survey of the most relevant and current environmental issues that have attracted public attention across the region and within countries in Latin America and the Caribbean in the first part of the 21st century. This volume will be of interest to students, instructors and researchers interested in Latin America and the Caribbean, media and the environment.