When addressing environmental issues, the media tends to present doomsday scenarios. This is the finding of a study undertaken by researchers from the University of the Basque Country (UBC) which analyzed the role played by the media in creating and spreading a stance regarding the protection of the environment, sustainable development, and natural heritage.

The research proposes and performs an analysis of the dialectic strategies used by the daily press in its treatment of environmental information.

The research team studied the information published in connection with the environmental summit held in Bali in 2007. Apart from this analysis, the researchers complemented this information with a survey carried out in Urdaibai, the Basque Country. The questions referred to the perceptions, attitudes, and willingness to participate in mitigating the adverse effects of climate change, aspects in relation to the social representations identified in the analysis of the contents of the study.

According to the results of the study, the news agenda that the media developed regarding the Summit in Bali focused on the scientific evidence of the global dimensions of climate change, the fact that its potentially devastating effects could be immediate, and its anthropogenic nature. However, according to the researchers, this agenda "avoided addressing the real reasons behind the political argument in detail, by means of a narrative strategy in which dramatising conflicts, threats and delays regarding CO2 quotas prevailed," becoming the top priority for the Bali Summit.

According to the research by the UBC, alarmist and catastrophist news focusing on the risk of natural disasters and the urgency of political and economic action "places the emphasis on the heroic efforts of abstract and distant individuals whose motives are not always clear." This approach, they say, appears to lack references to or be based on citizen's everyday life.

Furthermore, the prominence of the eco-efficient approach (based on expectations that techno-scientific development is enough to mitigate the effects of climate change) results in the media not covering the debate in connection with the social, economic, and cultural model that citizens are willing to assume and share, reinforcing instead, the perspective that our current way of life, production, and consumption is the only option available when it comes to interpreting development and sustainability.

The research was published in the latest issue of the Revista Latina de Comunicacion Social (Latin Journal of Social Communication).


- Katrice Jalbuena