Climate Change and Sustainability Issues in Indian Newspapers

2022 ◽  
pp. 780-798
Author(s):  
Nirmala Thirumalaiah ◽  
Arul Aram I.

Climate change conferences had wide media coverage – be it on newspaper, radio, television or the internet. The terms such as ‘climate change', ‘global warming', and ‘El Nino' are gaining popularity among the public. This study examines the news coverage of climate change issues in the major daily newspapers—The Times of India, The Hindu in English, and the Dina Thanthi, Dinamalar, and Dinamani in regional language (Tamil)—for the calendar years 2014 and 2015. This chapter describes how climate change influences nature and human life, and it is the basis for social and economic development. The news coverage of climate change and sustainability issues helps the reader better understand the concepts and perspectives of environment. Climate change communication in regional newspapers and local news stories may increase the public's interest and knowledge level regarding climate change and sustainability issues.

Author(s):  
Nirmala Thirumalaiah ◽  
Arul Aram I.

Climate change conferences had wide media coverage – be it on newspaper, radio, television or the internet. The terms such as ‘climate change', ‘global warming', and ‘El Nino' are gaining popularity among the public. This study examines the news coverage of climate change issues in the major daily newspapers—The Times of India, The Hindu in English, and the Dina Thanthi, Dinamalar, and Dinamani in regional language (Tamil)—for the calendar years 2014 and 2015. This chapter describes how climate change influences nature and human life, and it is the basis for social and economic development. The news coverage of climate change and sustainability issues helps the reader better understand the concepts and perspectives of environment. Climate change communication in regional newspapers and local news stories may increase the public's interest and knowledge level regarding climate change and sustainability issues.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-28
Author(s):  
T Nirmala ◽  
I. Arul Aram

This article describes how climate change influences nature and human life and it is the basis for social and economic development. News reporting on climate change must address the challenges in the deeper social and economic dimensions of sustainable development. The news coverage of climate change and sustainability issues helps people to better understand the concepts and perspectives of environment. This article aims to examine how dominant newspapers in Tamil Nadu have framed climate change and sustainability issues. This is done by analyzing climate change articles (N = 120) in two mainstream newspapers – The Hindu in English and the Daily Thanthi in Tamil. Climate change communication in regional newspapers and local news stories may increase the public's interest and knowledge level regarding climate change and sustainability issues.


2022 ◽  
pp. 426-439
Author(s):  
T Nirmala ◽  
I. Arul Aram

This article describes how climate change influences nature and human life and it is the basis for social and economic development. News reporting on climate change must address the challenges in the deeper social and economic dimensions of sustainable development. The news coverage of climate change and sustainability issues helps people to better understand the concepts and perspectives of environment. This article aims to examine how dominant newspapers in Tamil Nadu have framed climate change and sustainability issues. This is done by analyzing climate change articles (N = 120) in two mainstream newspapers – The Hindu in English and the Daily Thanthi in Tamil. Climate change communication in regional newspapers and local news stories may increase the public's interest and knowledge level regarding climate change and sustainability issues.


Author(s):  
Toby Bolsen ◽  
Matthew A. Shapiro

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. Please check back later for the full article. Most of what people think about politics comes from information acquired via exposure to mass media. Media thus serve a vital role in democracy as a fundamental conduit of political information. Scholars study the factors that drive news coverage about political issues, including the rise of discourse on climate change and shifts in media coverage over time. Climate change first received sustained attention in the U.S. press in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As scientific consensus emerged on the issue, interest groups and other actors emerged who accentuated the inherent uncertainty of climate science as a way to cast doubt on the existence of scientific consensus. The politicization of climate science has resulted in uncertainty among the public about its existence, anxiety about the effects of a fundamental transformation of U.S. energy systems, and support for the status quo in terms of the use of traditional energy sources. Media coverage often magnified the voices of contrarian scientists and skeptics because journalistic norms provided equal space to all sides, a semblance of false balance in news coverage that has persisted through the mid 2000s. By this time, the U.S. public had fractured along partisan lines due to rhetoric employed to generate support by elites. Media fragmentation and the rise of partisan news outlets further contributed to polarization, especially given the tendency of individuals to seek political information about climate change from trusted and credible sources. More recently, new media has come to play an increasingly significant role in communicating information on climate change to the public. Ultimately, there is a need for knowledge-based journalism in communicating climate change and energy alternatives to all segments of the U.S. public, but doing this effectively requires engagement with a broader audience in the debate over how best to address climate change. “Honest brokers” must be referenced in the media as they are best equipped to discuss the issue with citizens of different political identities and cultural worldviews. The success of collective efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change requires not only scientific consensus but the ability to communicate the science in a way that generates greater consensus among the public.


2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (04) ◽  
pp. 819-823 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew D. Atkinson ◽  
Maria Deam ◽  
Joseph E. Uscinski

ABSTRACTJournalists consider the importance of events and the audience’s interest in them when deciding on which events to report. Events most likely to be reported are those that are both important and can capture the audience’s interest. In turn, the public is most likely to become aware of important news when some aspect of the story piques their interest. We suggest an efficacious means of drawing public attention to important news stories: dogs. Examining the national news agenda of 10 regional newspapers relative to that of theNew York Times, we evaluated the effect of having a dog in a news event on the likelihood that the event is reported in regional newspapers. The “dog effect” is approximately equivalent to the effect of whether a story warrants front- or back-page national news coverage in theNew York Times. Thus, we conclude that dogs are an important factor in news decisions.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Merkley

Overlooked in analyses of why the public often rejects expert consensus is the role of the news media. News coverage of expert consensus on general matters of policy is likely limited as a result of journalists’ emphasis in news production on novelty and drama at the expense of thematic context. News content is also biased towards balance and conflict, which may dilute the persuasiveness of expert consensus. This study presents an automated and manual analysis of over 280,000 news stories on ten issues where there are important elements of agreement among scientists or economists. The analyses show that news content typically emphasizes arguments aligned with positions of expert consensus, rather than providing balance, and only occasionally cites contrarian experts. More troubling is that expert messages related to important areas of agreement are infrequent in news content, and cues signaling the existence of consensus are rarer still.


Author(s):  
Edson C. Tandoc ◽  
Nicholas Eng

While initial research on climate change communication focused on traditional media, such as news coverage of climate change and pro-environmental campaigns, scholars are increasingly focusing on the role of social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Sina Weibo. Social media platforms provide a space for three important domains of climate change communication: information, discussion, and mobilization. First, social media platforms have been used by scientists, activists, journalists, and ordinary people to share and receive reports about climate change. Policymakers and academics also use social media for climate change research. Second, social media platforms provide users with a space to discuss climate change issues. Scientists and journalists use social media to interact with the public, who also use social media to criticize policies, as well as media coverage. Finally, social media platforms have been used to coordinate rescue and relief operations in the aftermath of climate change–related disasters, as well as to organize movements and campaigns about climate change. However, most research about climate change communication in social media spaces are based on quantitative analysis of tweets from Western countries. While this body of work has been illuminating, our understanding of social media’s increasingly important role in climate change communication will benefit from a more holistic research approach that explores social media use in climate change communication across a variety of platforms, cultures, and media systems.


Author(s):  
Maxwell Boykoff ◽  
Gesa Luedecke

During the past three decades, elite news media have become influential translators of climate change linking science, policy, and the citizenry. Historical trends in public discourse—shaped in significant part by elite media—demonstrate news media’s critical role in shaping public perception and the level of concern towards climate change. Media representations of climate change and global warming are embedded in social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions that influence individual-level processes such as everyday journalistic practices. Media have a strong influence on policy decision-making, attitudes, perspectives, intentions, and behavioral change, but those connections can be challenging to pinpoint; consequently, examinations of elite news coverage of climate change, particularly in recent decades, have sought to gain a stronger understanding of these complex and dynamic webs of interactions. In so doing, research has more effectively traced how media have taken on varied roles in the climate change debate, from watch dogs to lap dogs to guard dogs in the public sphere. Within these areas of research, psychological aspects of media influence have been relatively underemphasized. However, interdisciplinary and problem-focused research investigations of elite media coverage stand to advance considerations of public awareness, discourse, and engagement. Elite news media critically contribute to public discourse and policy priorities through their “mediating” and interpretative influences. Therefore, a review of examinations of these dynamics illuminate the bridging role of elite news coverage of climate change between formal science and policy, and everyday citizens in the public sphere.


2015 ◽  
Vol 59 (7) ◽  
pp. 858-875 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toril Aalberg ◽  
Audun Beyer

The media have a strong tendency to frame political issues with a focus on personal and emotional cases. We do not, however, know if there is a close link between the news media’s use of these frames and the news preferences of the public. Such a close relationship may exist either because human interest news coverage is driven by audience demand or because the public might be influenced by the degree of individual news stories in the news. On the other hand, the audience’s news preferences may be unrelated to the actual media coverage on irregular immigration due to citizens’ selective media exposure, which may be driven by political predispositions. Based on a large quantitative content analysis conducted in the United States, France, and Norway and a following public opinion survey in the same countries, we find that the application of a human interest frame in a country’s news coverage of irregular immigration does not correspond with the public’s preferences for this type of news coverage. On the individual level, our findings demonstrate that liberal audience groups favor human interest–framed news coverage, while conservatives do not agree that individual news stories would provide a better understanding of the issue of irregular immigration.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (7) ◽  
pp. 797-811 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brianne Suldovsky ◽  
Asheley Landrum ◽  
Natalie Jomini Stroud

In an era where expertise is increasingly critiqued, this study draws from the research on expertise and scientist stereotyping to explore who the public considers to be a scientist in the context of media coverage about climate change and genetically modified organisms. Using survey data from the United States, we find that political ideology and science knowledge affect who the US public believes is a scientist in these domains. Our results suggest important differences in the role of science media attention and science media selection in the publics “scientist” labeling. In addition, we replicate previous work and find that compared to other people who work in science, those with PhDs in Biology and Chemistry are most commonly seen as scientists.


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