Trends and patterns in sustainability-related media coverage: A classification of issue-level attention

Ralf Barkemeyer, Philippe Givry and Frank Figge ()

Environment and Planning C, 2018, vol. 36, issue 5, 937-962

Abstract: Sustainability has moved from fringe topic to headline news and key policy discourse in its own right. Yet, the sustainability discourse remains fragmented, with a diverse set of challenges receiving vastly different levels of attention. Nevertheless, the vast majority of previous studies have focused on media attention to climate change, whereas other sustainability challenges have received much less attention in the academic literature. In this paper, we explore trends and patterns in media coverage across a set of ten sustainability challenges. In particular, we are interested in the extent to which the recent trends and patterns in coverage that have been well-documented for climate change are reflected by other sustainability challenges. We utilise a sample of 23 broadsheet newspapers from five different countries (Australia, Canada, Germany, UK, US), covering a 17-year period from 2000 to 2016. Using the agenda-setting literature as a starting-point for our enquiry, we then turn to the toolset provided by financial econometrics to develop a basic typology of media attention focusing on the two dimensions information/noise and seasonality/non-seasonality. We find that media coverage on climate change, poverty and HIV/AIDS can mainly be characterized as information, whereas the remaining seven issues included in our study appear noise-driven. Seasonal patterns in coverage appear most pronounced for socioeconomic issues. Media attention to biodiversity and cleaner technologies has been crowded in by increased coverage on climate change. At the same time, we find clear divergences from overall trends and patterns at the level of different countries and individual newspapers.

Keywords: Sustainable development; media attention; agenda-setting; broadsheet newspapers; time-series (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2399654417732337 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirc:v:36:y:2018:i:5:p:937-962

DOI: 10.1177/2399654417732337

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning C
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().