Article

the International
Communication Gazette
Communication, media 73(1-2) 7–25
ª The Author(s) 2011
and environment: Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

Towards reconnecting DOI: 10.1177/1748048510386739

gaz.sagepub.com

research on the
production, content
and social implications
of environmental
communication

Anders Hansen
University of Leicester, UK

Abstract
Surveying environmental communication research of the past four decades, the
article delineates some of the key trends and approaches in research which has
sought to address the role played by media and communication processes in the public
and political definition, elaboration and contestation of environmental issues and
problems. It is argued: (1) that there is a need to reconnect the traditional, but
traditionally also relative distinct, three major foci of communication research on media
and environmental issues: the production/construction of media messages and public
communications; the content/messages of media communication; and the impact of
media and public communication on public/political understanding and action with
regard to the environment; and (2) that there is a need for media and communications
research on environmental issues/controversy to reconnect with traditional sociological
concerns about power and inequality in the public sphere, particularly in terms of
showing how economic, political and cultural power significantly affects the ability to
participate in and influence the nature of public ‘mediated’ communication about the
environment.

Corresponding author:
Anders Hansen, Department of Media and Communication, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester
LE1 7RH, UK
Email: ash@le.ac.uk
8 the International Communication Gazette 73(1-2)

Keywords
agenda-setting, climate change, environmental communication, environmental journalism,
environment reporters, news management, news sources, politics and environment,
public communication access/power, public understanding, visual communication

Introduction
The ‘environment’ – particularly and recently in the shape of ‘climate change’ – has
over the last three to four decades become one of the key public and political concerns
of our time, and the media and public communication have been and continue to be
central in this regard.
Much, maybe most, of what we learn and know about ‘the environment’, we know
from the media, broadly defined. Indeed, this applies not only to our beliefs and knowl-
edge about those aspects of the environment which are regarded as problems or issues for
public and political concern, but extends much deeper into the ways in which we – as
individuals, cultures and societies – view, perceive, value and relate to our environment.
What particularly distinguishes the history of the recent half century is the crucial
role played by mass media and communication defining ‘the environment’ as a concept
and domain, and in bringing environmental issues and problems to public and political
attention. Thus, since the emergence and rise of the modern environmental movement
in the 1960s, the mass media have been a central public arena for publicizing environ-
mental issues and for contesting claims, arguments and opinions about our use and
abuse of the environment.
Where in earlier eras much political decision-making with regard to the environment
may have been based largely on expert and scientific evidence, with a keen eye on eco-
nomic development and ‘progress’, such decision-making has increasingly been influ-
enced and governed by how environmental and related issues are presented to and
perceived by the public. Whether looking at public debate and controversy regarding the
ozone layer, industrial/chemical pollution, oil spills, intensive farming, deforestation,
depletion of fish-stocks and other natural resources, species extinction, climate change,
whaling, animal experimentation or the multiple issues relating to rapid advances in the
bio-genetic sciences, it appears that the battles over these issues are now as much to do
with communication aimed at ‘winning hearts and minds’ as they are to do with commu-
nicating science-based or expert evidence.
The aim of this article is to delineate some of the key trajectories in research – over
the last three to four decades – on ‘media/communication and the environment’, and, on
the basis of a necessarily sweeping review of key strands of research, to indicate further
lines of enquiry to be pursued and to indicate some of the potentially promising frame-
works, approaches and research foci for helping us understand the role played by media
and communication processes in the public and political definition, elaboration and con-
testation of environmental issues and problems.
My argument is twofold: (1) that there is a need for reconnecting and reintegrating the
traditional, but traditionally also relative distinct, three major foci of communication
research on media and environmental issues: the production/construction of media mes-
sages and public communications; the content/messages of media communication; and
Hansen 9

the impact of media and public communication on audiences, broadly speaking,

including ‘the general public’ as well as particular groups of publics, e.g. politicians,
scientists, experts, decision-makers, pressure groups, etc.; and (2) that there is a need for
media and communications research on environmental issues/controversy to reconnect
with traditional sociological concerns about power and inequality in the public sphere
and in public communication.

The rise and consolidation of environmental

communication research
Communication is central to how we come to know, and to know about, the environ-
ment and environmental issues, and the major communications media are a central
public arena through which we become aware of environmental issues and the way
in which they are addressed, contested and resolved. Indeed, the centrality of ‘commu-
nication’ to the rise of ‘the environment’ as a core social and political issue since the
1960s is reflected in the increasing prominence and consolidation enjoyed by ‘environ-
mental communication’ studies as a distinctive strand within media and communica-
tion studies generally.
This development has been underway since the 1970s, but it is perhaps particularly the
1990s and the most recent decade that have seen a maturing and embedding of environ-
mental communication research within national and international communication associa-
tions and within university-level courses and curricula. Sustaining this trend and its
consolidation is the growing body of book-length publications on environmental commu-
nication and closely related fields (e.g. Allan, 2002; Allan et al., 2000; Boyce and Lewis,
2009; Corbett, 2006; Cottle, 2009; Cox, 2010; Hannigan, 2006; Hansen, 2010; Lester,
2010), and the rapid growth in journal articles across a range of science/environment/
health and communications journals, including the establishment of academic journals
specifically focused on environmental communication.
While media and communication research focused on the environment and environ-
mental issues/problems has thus become firmly established as a distinctive field over the
last two decades, it has also evolved and diversified in a number of important ways. Studies
of environmental communication have thus evolved from a relatively narrow focus on
‘environmental issues’ to be part of the growth in studies across the much broader spec-
trum of media and communications issues regarding science, medicine/health, environ-
ment and risk (Hansen, 2009). Second, the field has seen important developments away
from traditional, narrow concerns with mainstream news coverage of environmental issues
– often perceived in simple journalistic terms of balance and bias – and its influence on
public opinion towards drawing on a much richer body of theories and approaches to help
understand and elucidate the broader social, political and cultural roles of environmental
communication.
The social constructionist perspective (Blumer, 1971; Schneider, 1985; Spector and
Kitsuse, 1973) helped move communication research on environmental problems out
of journalism studies trapped in circular concerns with balance, bias and objectivity, and
proved a productive inspiration for attempts at grappling with sociological interpreta-
tions of the media’s role in public and political controversy about the environment
10 the International Communication Gazette 73(1-2)

(Burgess, 1990; Gamson and Modigliani, 1989; Hilgartner and Bosk, 1988). Within
mainstream media and communication research, organizational and culturalist perspec-
tives (Gans, 1979; Schudson, 1989) on news production, agenda-setting research and, in
the last two decades or so, the concepts of ‘framing’, ‘interpretive packages’ and ‘cul-
tural resonances’ have provided productive – and often overlapping - frameworks for
analysing environmental communication.
A central characteristic that cuts across most – if not all – the major perspectives and
models that have been deployed in the analysis of media, communication and the envi-
ronment is the close attention often paid to language, or more specifically to lexis and
discourse in public communication about the environment. There is thus a clear recog-
nition that lexical choice (including particularly the use/choice of metaphor) and dis-
cursive practices are central components of how issues are rhetorically constructed and
‘framed’ and how in turn particular messages/meanings are conveyed and boundaries
set for public understanding and public interpretation/opinion regarding environmental
issues. The insights afforded by critical discourse analysis have proved particularly
productive in uncovering the meanings of media content and other public communica-
tion about the environment (Carvalho, 2008), although, as Carvalho (2007: 225) has
rightly noted the ‘role of ideology in media representations . . . is still blatantly
under-researched’.
However, while recognizing that these perspectives have provided tremendously
productive and rich frameworks and inspiration, my main contention remains that they
have not, as yet, succeeded sufficiently in re-connecting the study of media production
and media content with the study of the wider social and political dynamics, roles and
influences of ‘media/mediated’ communication about the environment. Put simply,
while we now know a great deal about how sources/communicators interact with and
influence media professionals and the media agenda, and we know a great deal about
how the media cover/depict/portray a wide variety of environmental, science, health,
disaster and related issues, and we know a great deal about public and political under-
standing and opinion about these issues, far too little is known about how these three
major domains/forums interact with each other.

Producing environmental communication: Sources,

journalists, media
Research on the ‘production of environmental communication’ centres essentially on the
sources, who make claims in the public sphere and/or try to influence what is publicly
communicated, and the media and media professionals, whose task it is to report on
or cover the environment and ‘environmental issues’. While there is now a significant
body of research on the communication and publicity practices of sources of environ-
mental messages as well as on environmental journalism and the practices of journalists,
it is also the case that the academic literature in these fields has had some difficulty in
keeping up with the remarkably rapid changes witnessed in the last two decades in the
wider media, news and communications environment. Driven by a combination of eco-
nomic pressures and breathtaking advances in communications technology, the roles,
operations and practices of news media and news professionals have changed very
Hansen 11

significantly in the last decades. At the same time, this period has witnessed
considerable changes in source/claims-making practices, including a significant rise
in public communications efforts, PR and diverse forms of ‘spin’ and news manage-
ment (Davis, 2008), resulting in a changed balance of power in the relationship
between sources/claims-makers and journalists/media professionals.
Early studies noted that the extent and nature of media coverage of ‘the
environment’ was closely dependent on the existence within media organizations of
a designated environmental ‘beat’ staffed by specialist environment correspondents
(Schoenfeld et al., 1979), and this has been confirmed by later studies, which have also
noted the considerable fluctuations over time in the media’s commitment to environ-
mental journalism (Friedman, 2004; Gaber, 2000). Friedman (2004: 177), in her over-
view of American environmental journalism, thus remarks that ‘the environmental beat
has never really been stable, riding a cycle of ups and downs like an elevator. These
cycles, and consequent increases or decreases in numbers of environmental reporters
and their space or air time, appear to be driven by public interest and events, as well
as economic conditions.’
While Friedman (2004: 176) describes the 1990s as the decade that environmental
journalism ‘grew into its shoes’, she also points to the ever increasing pressures on envi-
ronmental journalists caught between a shrinking news hole/increased media competi-
tion and ‘a growing need to tell longer, complicated and more in-depth stories’.
Similar points are echoed in the findings from a recent comprehensive national study
by Sachsman et al. (2006) of US environment reporters. Sachsman and his colleagues
also found important differences across type and size of media: ‘newspapers were far
more likely than television stations to have a reporter covering the environment on a reg-
ular basis’ (p. 98); and larger newspapers were more likely than smaller newspapers to
employ environment reporters.
The potentially significant role and power of news sources in influencing news cov-
erage of the environment has long been recognized. Sachsman (1976), in an early and
pioneering study of the relationship between environmental news sources and media
reporting, thus found that over half of environmental news reports originated in or drew
directly on source-generated press releases and public relations efforts. The indications
from more recent research are that the balance of power in the relationship between
sources and journalists has shifted increasingly in favour of sources.
Lewis et al. (2008) thus argue that ‘pressures on journalists to increase productivity, via
substantive growths in the pagination of national newspapers across the last two decades,
achieved with relatively static numbers of journalists . . . have prompted desk-bound jour-
nalists to develop an increasing reliance on pre-packaged sources of news deriving from
the PR industry and news agencies’ (Lewis et al., 2008: 1). In their comprehensive study
of UK print and broadcast media, Lewis and his colleagues found that in broadcast media
‘the business world was nearly four times as likely as NGOs or pressure groups to ‘‘place’’
their PR material into news stories’ (p. 12); and that ‘news, especially in print, is routinely
recycled from elsewhere and yet the widespread use of other material is rarely attributed to
its source’ (p. 18). Their study shows that ‘when it comes to getting information in the
news, the most successful ‘‘spin doctors’’ come from business rather than from NGOs,
charities or pressure groups’ (p. 12).
12 the International Communication Gazette 73(1-2)

While the study by Lewis et al. does not look specifically at environmental news
coverage, there are indications from elsewhere that the exponential growth in online and
internet journalism, witnessed in the last decade or so, has impacted particularly on
science/health/environmental journalism (Trench, 2009: 175). Economic pressures and
organizational pressures have led to journalism that is increasingly desk-bound, which
in turn has increased the scope for proactive news sources and news-providers to ‘sub-
sidize’ the work of news organizations and their journalists with ready-packaged and
advantageously framed ‘information’, while at the same time depriving journalists of
some of their most traditional networking and source-checking strategies based around
‘face-to-face’ interviews or contacts with sources.
While numerous studies have shown media reporting on environmental issues to be
typically authority-oriented, with prominent use of scientists and government sources
and a generally much lower profile for NGOs and environmental pressure groups, few
studies have succeeded in capturing the truly dynamic interaction of claims, source/
claims-making practices, journalistic practices and media reporting. Much attention,
particularly in research on environmental pressure groups and other sources, has focused
on the extent to which they are capable of influencing journalists and gaining media cov-
erage, while much less is known about important source communication strategies
geared towards staying out of the media and public limelight, or more specifically
towards preventing competitor-definitions or opposing groups from getting media cov-
erage or from gaining legitimacy in the public sphere.
Environmental pressure groups, keen on achieving media coverage for whatever issue
they are campaigning on, often seem to overlook what has long been recognized as a key
dialectical principle of debate in the public sphere, namely that every claim tends to
generate a counter-claim (Ibarra and Kitsuse, 1993). Interestingly, this principle is often
exacerbated by that most fundamental journalistic rule or practice, namely the impera-
tive of providing ‘balanced’ coverage. An unintended (on the part of environmental pres-
sure groups) ‘side-effect’ of successfully commanding media attention may thus be to
galvanize opposition and to prompt a sharpening of opponents’ publicity practices
(Wallack et al., 1999). As Austrian communications researchers Signitzer and Prexl
(2007) point out in their analysis of ‘greenwashing’, activism pressure often tends to sti-
mulate – in corporate organizations – a redoubling of corporate public relations efforts to
pre-empt, counter, engage with, accommodate, undermine, frame, etc. the arguments and
claims of pressure groups.
Research on the news management, publicity and campaigning practices of environ-
mental pressure groups has increasingly, if somewhat belatedly, been complemented by
comparable research on how large corporations/companies, scientific institutions, gov-
ernment departments and political parties seek to actively manage and influence commu-
nication about the environment and associated controversial issues (Beder, 2002; Davis,
2007). Sharon Beder (2002) points to the increasing use of ‘front’ groups, seemingly
independent and impartial groups set up by business or industry to promote its interests
in the public sphere while appearing to merely be representing the ‘public interest’.
A prime example of relevance here is the Global Climate Coalition, ‘a coalition of fifty
US trade associations and private companies representing oil, gas, coal, automobile and
chemical interests’ (Beder, 2002: 29), whose main objective was to cast doubt on the
Hansen 13

evidence for global warming/climate change and to fight scientific, political and
legislative initiatives to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
Aeron Davis (2008: 278) similarly notes how ‘access by proxy’ or ‘third party endor-
sement’ has increasingly become part of sources’ repertoire of proactive communication
strategies aimed at managing, manipulating and influencing media coverage and other
public communication. The resources available to and deployed by sources (especially
business, industry, government and other resource-rich sources) have increased, and pro-
motional techniques have grown in sophistication, while at the same time resources
available to media and media professionals have diminished, resulting in a radically
changed balance of power between sources and journalists/media.
While much is thus now known about environmental journalism, about sources and
their communication strategies, and about the shifting balance of power between the two,
much also remains to be done. This is particularly so with regard to: (1) mapping how
economic pressures on media organizations and rapid technological changes in the news
environment impact on journalistic practices and on environmental journalists in partic-
ular; (2) mapping the ‘careers’ of claims-making and claims, to show, not just how and to
what extent sources succeed in ‘commanding media attention’, but more importantly
how they succeed in ‘claiming legitimacy’ and ‘invoking action’ (Solesbury, 1976) in
the public sphere; and finally, (3) to begin to unpack the complex dynamics and dialec-
tics of claims-making and counter-claims-making, including the ‘hidden’ source strate-
gies aimed at diverting media attention away or at preventing issues or competitor groups
from gaining media publicity.

Covering the environment: Studies of media representations

Easily the most prolific focus of media and communications research has been and con-
tinues to be that of news coverage of environmental issues and controversies. Analyses
of news coverage have encompassed a broad range of individual and distinct types of
environmental issues, but key areas attracting a more sustained research focus have been:
pollution/contamination disasters (broadly defined and including particularly oil- and
chemical-related pollution disasters); nuclear power (although both media and research
interest in nuclear issues has been muted since the early 1990s); and – since the late
1980s – global warming and climate change.
While ‘news’ continues to be the main focus of environmental communication
research, an important and much needed body of research on other types of media and
genres has begun to emerge, e.g. on the uses and representations of nature, the environ-
ment and environmentalism in film (Ingram, 2000), documentary (Bousé, 2000), adver-
tising and entertainment television (Meister and Japp, 2002; Shanahan and McComas,
1999). These are important developments because they help demonstrate, inter alia, that
the successes or failures of particular claims, frames and messages about environmental
issues in the news media have to be understood against the background of the kind of
messages, images and ideologies about the environment that dominate and resonate in
the wider cultural and symbolic environment.
Research on media coverage of environmental issues has contributed considerably to
our understanding of why some environmental issues are successfully constructed as
14 the International Communication Gazette 73(1-2)

issues for public concern, while others – seemingly equally serious or important – quickly
vanish from the media agenda and from public view. Of particular interest here is perhaps
the seemingly cyclical nature of environmental coverage and public environmental con-
cern in what Downs (1972) presciently referred to as ‘the issue-attention cycle’.
Snapshot/synchronic analyses of news coverage of environmental ‘events’, disasters
or environmental issues can be highly effective in demonstrating the operation of partic-
ular news values, the ‘authority-orientation’ of news coverage (i.e. news media tend to
turn to politicians, scientists, experts and establishment representatives for definitions of
issues, rather than to NGO or environmental pressure group representatives or indeed to
‘victims’ or other members of the general public) and the thematic emphases and fram-
ing of issues characteristic of environmental issues coverage. With regards to framing,
studies – following Iyengar’s (1991) typology – have thus often noted the ‘episodic’
rather than ‘thematic’ framing of environmental issues, that is, a narrow focus on these
as individual and discrete issues/events, rather than a focus on the wider context, history
and background that may be crucial to understanding the nature and particularly the
interconnectedness of environmental issues and problems.
Longitudinal, diachronic studies of news coverage of environmental issues, by con-
trast, have considerably more to offer, than snapshot/synchronic studies, in terms of
showing not only what ‘drives’ environmental coverage, but also, and more importantly,
in terms of throwing light on how different meaning-creating forums (Gamson, 1988)
and agendas interact (Ader, 1995; Nisbet and Lewenstein, 2002; Trumbo, 1995;
Uscinski, 2009), e.g. interaction of the news media agenda, the formal political agenda,
the legal agenda, the science agenda and the public opinion agenda. Longitudinal anal-
yses, mapping the significant fluctuations over time in media attention to climate change
and other environmental issues, have greatly facilitated and enhanced recognition of the
key roles of claims-making practices, news values, journalistic practices and media orga-
nizational routines in determining the extent and framing of coverage.
Several studies have thus noted how significant peaks in news attention to climate
change have been closely related to, variously, the publication of major reports (e.g.
reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] and the Stern [2006]
report), international meetings/summits (such as the Conference of the Parties [COP],
international meetings, notably in Kyoto in 1997, and more recently COP15 in Copenha-
gen, 2009) and campaigns such as Al Gore’s lecture series and the associated book and
film An Inconvenient Truth. Longitudinal studies further potentially give an insight into
the interaction of issues (see McGaurr and Lester [2009] for an insightful analysis of the
interaction of ‘nuclear energy’ and ‘climate change’ in media coverage), issue competition
and what Hilgartner and Bosk (1988) aptly refer to as the ‘limited carrying capacity’ of
media and other key forums. Thus, wars and major economic crises have a tendency to
push the environment off or down the media news agenda (Boykoff, 2009; Hansen, 1993).
Rarely, however, are such dynamics a simple matter of ‘the environment’ being
merely displaced by other – in the media’s view – more pressing and important news.
What appears as a decline in media coverage of a particular issue, may in fact just be a
matter of discursive diversification, i.e. what starts out as an often predominantly sci-
entific discourse on a particular environmental issue or problem, soon spreads into and
becomes part of a wider range of discourses, including economic, legal, ethical, etc.
Hansen 15

discourses, and likewise, as Boykoff (2009: 438) has recently noted, ‘issues formerly
discussed explicitly as climate change or global warming’ may increasingly be covered
‘as energy issues, sustainability considerations, and other associated themes (e.g.,
carbontrading)’.
Add to these potential factors, the likelihood of some degree of lexical change and
re-lexicalization (Fairclough, 1989) over time (e.g. ‘climate change’ was in the late
1980s and part of the 1990s referred to mainly as ‘global warming’ or the ‘greenhouse
effect’, and similar (semi-)deliberate changes can be found elsewhere, e.g. in relation to
biotechnology [Bauer et al., 1999]), and it becomes clear that the ups and downs in envi-
ronmental issues coverage that content analyses of news media reveal rarely, if ever,
reflect just a single influential factor, but likely result from the complex interaction of mul-
tiple factors. This, perhaps seemingly inconclusive conclusion should not, however,
detract from the considerable potential and actual achievements of longitudinal studies
of media coverage in contributing to a nuanced understanding of how media agendas are
constructed and of how they interact with other agendas as demonstrated for example by
agenda-setting research (discussed in the next section). At the very least it should be clear
that the careful longitudinal examination and mapping (whether by way of traditional con-
tent analysis, or framing analysis, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and other suitable
methods) of media coverage is an essential, and potentially highly productive, starting
point if we wish to begin, as I started out arguing, to reconnect the study of media content
with empirical evidence on either its production/construction or its implications for public
understanding/engagement, political and related processes and power in society.
While media and communication research on environmental issues has comprised a
wide and diverse range of environmental problems, the most prolific area of research in
the recent period has been that of ‘climate change’ (e.g. Moser and Dilling, 2007). This is
not entirely surprising, as the ‘climate debate’ itself has increasingly assumed the posi-
tion of a ‘master-discourse’, i.e. an umbrella-concept subsuming a whole variety of
hitherto relatively disparate, separate and distinct discussions and issues. The potential
downside to the increasing concentration of media coverage and public debate around
climate change is that a whole range of environmental issues which cannot in some form
or other be easily linked to the by now well-rehearsed public discourse on climate change
disappear from public view, and consequently fall by the wayside also in terms of public
or political action.
One of the most interesting and productive developments in approaches to media cov-
erage of environmental issues has been the increasing application of the concept of
‘framing’, i.e. the principles of ‘selection’ and ‘salience’ (Entman, 1993) in media con-
tent which may contribute to the structuring of public and political responses by directing
attention to: what the issue/problem is; who/what is responsible; and what the solution is
(Ryan, 1991).
Drawing on the frame/package categories developed by Gamson and Modigliani
(1989) in their analysis of nuclear issues and popular culture, studies of media and envi-
ronmental issues have demonstrated how key interpretative packages (‘progress’, ‘eco-
nomic prospect’, ‘ethical’, ‘Pandora’s box’, ‘runaway’, ‘nature/nurture’, ‘public
accountability’ and ‘globalization’) are strategically deployed and manipulated by key
sources in public environmental debate, with significant potential implications for both
16 the International Communication Gazette 73(1-2)

the nature of media coverage and the mobilization of public understanding of controversial
issues such as climate change (Nisbet, 2009).
Several studies have commented on the extent to which news media project a view of
certainty or uncertainty about climate change and its causes. Comparing US and UK
media coverage, Boykoff and Rajan (2007) thus found a greater emphasis on controversy
and uncertainty in US coverage, resulting to a large extent from the operation of the jour-
nalistic principle of ‘balance’ and the tendency to give equal credence to sources arguing
for the notion that climate change is anthropogenic and to ‘climate sceptics’ who cast
doubt on this notion and tend to argue that climate change, to the extent that they accept
that it is happening, is a natural process and part of natural cyclical variation. By contrast,
studies of European media have generally found much greater certainty about the anthro-
pogenic nature of climate change, and a concomitantly more narrow range of views with
comparatively little access or credence given to the views of climate sceptics (Brossard
et al., 2004; Dirikx and Gelders, 2009). There are also indications that European cover-
age has tended to be more ‘alarmist’ in its language use (Ereaut and Segnit, 2006; Von
Storch and Krauss, 2005). A recent study of Dutch and French newspapers by Dirikx and
Gelders (2009) found what they describe as an ‘encouraging’ emphasis on framing cli-
mate change within a responsibility frame (i.e. responsibility for the cause of or solution
to climate change is placed on political authorities, individuals and groups) and within a
consequences frame (highlighting how the issue will economically affect people), and
much less prominence of a conflict frame (highlighting conflicts or divergence of views
between parties or individuals).
A significant outcome of these studies is the recognition that despite the increasingly
globalized nature of communication and communications media, the framing of key
environmental issues such as climate change may vary considerably between continents
(North America and Europe, in the aforementioned studies), cultures and even poten-
tially between countries. However, this is a field that remains inadequately researched
as there are relatively few studies that directly make such comparisons. Hansen and
Linne (1994) found that even between culturally relatively similar countries like the
UK and Denmark, significant differences in the extent and nature of television coverage
of environmental issues could be explained in terms particularly of different cultural/
political traditions and attitudes to pollution and citizen/worker safety. Brossard et al.
(2004) similarly found that some differences in US and French press coverage of global
climate change could be explained in terms of differences of cultural/political traditions,
although the main differences seemed to be accounted for by differences of ‘journalistic
culture’ (e.g. ‘opinion’ vs ‘objectivity’ in reporting), which in turn influenced thematic
emphases and the types of sources cited.
Just as the comparison between countries or cultures can provide important clues to
how the extent and nature of environmental issues coverage, and its framing and inflec-
tion, are circumscribed by cultural resonances and shaped by journalistic traditions and
organizational constraints, so too is it important to recognize how different types of
media and different media formats also afford very different possibilities in terms of
what is/can be communicated about the environment. Studies have thus shown the sig-
nificant differences between national and local/regional media in how they frame envi-
ronmental issues coverage, how critical/uncritical the reporting is and what types of
Hansen 17

sources predominate (e.g. Cottle, 2000; Crawley, 2007; Dunwoody and Griffin, 1993;
Taylor et al., 2000; Wakefield and Elliott, 2003).
Despite the commonly recognized, in communication research as well as other disci-
plines, rise and increasing dominance of visual media/communication, communication
research has very predominantly remained focused on the use of text/word-oriented
methods of analysis and on the analysis of the lexical messages of media. While the
important role of visuals in news coverage of the environment (from natural disasters
to oil spills, chemical spills, deforestation, acidification, open-cast mining and despolia-
tion of natural environments, the ozone ‘hole’ – itself a constructed visual metaphor –
and the visualization of climate change) has long been recognized and commented on
in communication research, rarely has the analysis of visuals or the visualization of the
environment been the main focus of analysis, or indeed the subject of systematic or long-
itudinal analysis of the kind referred to above. However, there have been promising signs
in recent years that this pattern is changing with studies focused on the visualization of
the environment in newspaper photographs (Seppänen and Väliverronen, 2003), in tele-
vision news (Cottle, 2000; Lester and Cottle, 2009), in pressure group and advertising
campaigns (Doyle, 2007; Linder, 2006), in global image banks supplying visuals for
promotions, advertising and news media (Hansen and Machin, 2008), as well as more gen-
eral surveys with an emphasis on visual media representation (Gold and Revill, 2004).
Cottle (2000: 39, 41) notes how British television, alongside conventional visual repre-
sentation of nature and the environment as ‘spectacle’ and ‘landscape’, routinely visualizes
the environment as ‘industrially defiled’ and ‘under threat’. Building on these insights,
Lester and Cottle (2009), in an impressive recent global survey of television news, offer
a welcome contribution towards filling in the gaps in what they describe as the much
‘under-theorized’ and ‘under-researched’ visual dimension of climate change coverage.
They conclude, inter alia:

News media, in their reporting on climate change, routinely visualize environments and
people as under threat, and when they do so, they often deploy spectacular and culturally
resonant images. This visualization, as discussed, can convey powerful symbolic messages
and appears to be performatively deployed by professional journalists encouraging public
recognition of the seriousness and the human consequences of climate change. As we have
seen, it draws on a range of images and spectacular scenes that reference widely understood
global symbols of climate change, as well as more localized cultural and historical reso-
nances of place. (Lester and Cottle, 2009: 932)

They very interestingly and significantly demonstrate how different key actors (politi-
cians, scientists, environmental protesters, victims of climate change, etc.) are visually
constructed in ways which associate different degrees of authority, credibility and trust
with these actors. While Lester and Cottle’s analysis offers a major and welcome step
forward, this type of analysis needs to be pushed significantly further on at least two
fronts: (1) in terms of accounting for how visuals – despite their seemingly self-
explanatory photographic window-on-the-world quality – are invariably ‘made to mean’
or signify in particular ways (not least through the accompanying narrative context and
through the format and other signifying conventions of the medium); and (2) in terms of
18 the International Communication Gazette 73(1-2)

unpacking how visualization and the construction of visual meanings serve to bolster and
privilege particular ideological views and perspectives on climate change over others.
Visual analysis, like discourse analysis or framing analysis, thus needs to engage with
questions about how source-roles (including visually focused claims-making, ‘informa-
tion subsidies’, PR and news management strategies), journalistic conventions and prac-
tices, format constraints and media organizational arrangements interact and impinge on
whose (visual) definitions gain prominence and are afforded legitimacy in the news
media and wider public communication.

Social and political implications of environmental

communication
Ultimately, the assumption, whether explicit or implicit, behind most research into
media representations of environmental issues is that these play a role in shaping and
influencing public understanding/opinion and political decision-making in society. Like
research on the production and content of media representations of environmental issues,
studies of the wider social implications of such coverage have been characterized by
increasing sophistication and appreciation of the highly complex ways in which environ-
mental messages, images and beliefs circulate in society. Studies have noted interesting
parallels between the ups-and-downs of media coverage of the environment and compa-
rable trends in public concern about the environment, as measured through public opin-
ion surveys. However, mapping the relationship between media coverage and public
concern has proved rather more of a challenge.
Agenda-setting studies have confirmed that the media can play a potentially powerful
role in setting the agenda for public concern about and awareness of environmental
issues (Soroka, 2002), although there is also evidence of the reverse type of agenda-
setting – for issues such as energy and environment and particularly where these are not
characterized by spectacular or singular events – where public issue concerns appear to
drive issue coverage in the news (Uscinski, 2009). In a meticulous and longitudinal anal-
ysis of issue attentiveness in three interacting forums – media, parliament and govern-
ment – in Belgium in the 1990s, Walgrave et al. (2008) demonstrate not only an
agenda-setting effect of media coverage on parliament and government agendas, but also
note how the strength of this influence varies with type of medium (newspapers exerted
more influence than television) and with type of issue. Thus – and of particular interest
here – media effects were found to be larger for environmental issues than for foreign
policy or economic issues. Studies of agenda-setting with environmental issues have also
confirmed a long recognized finding in agenda-setting research that media agenda-
setting is most pronounced in relation to ‘unobtrusive’ issues (Zucker, 1978), where
direct personal experience or access to non-media sources of information is limited. This
finding is interestingly also confirmed by experimental studies: thus, Corbett and Durfee
(2004) in an experiment measuring people’s reactions to different news presentations of
global warming found that people who already prior to the experiment held strong envi-
ronmental views were much less swayed, than those who did not, by variations in how
global warming was presented in the news. With the ‘quantity of coverage’ thesis, and
building on the agenda-setting model, Mazur (1990) and others (see Gutteling [2005] for
Hansen 19

a review) have similarly shown that increased media coverage of and emphasis on
controversy leads to increased public opposition and perception of risk.
Cultivation analyses, comparing the environmental beliefs of ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ tele-
vision viewers, have also yielded interesting insights. The relative absence of the ‘environ-
ment’ in television entertainment content thus leads to ‘cultivation in reverse’, i.e. viewers
who watch a great deal of television entertainment tend to be less concerned about the
environment, while those who focus on news and documentaries in their television con-
sumption tend to have higher levels of environmental awareness and concern (Besley and
Shanahan, 2004; Good, 2009; Shanahan, 1993; Shanahan and McComas, 1999).
As indicated in the previous section, the concept of framing has proved an immensely
useful, popular and productive perspective and framework for analyses of media cover-
age of the environment (as well as indeed many other subjects of media coverage, includ-
ing science and health). Its potential as a bridge between the study of media/
communications content and public/political understanding, opinion and decision-
making has not been lost on communication researchers (e.g. Scheufele, 1999; Scheufele
and Tewksbury, 2007) although – and this, as indicated at the start, is the main conten-
tion of this article – insufficient progress has been made in terms of empirically recon-
necting the study of frames and framing in media/communications content with the study
of how different publics (lay publics, experts, scientists, politicians) draw on and incor-
porate (or reject) such frames and messages in their own meaning creation and actions.
In addition to the promising work, discussed briefly above, being done within the fra-
meworks of agenda-setting and cultivation research, other promising developments
include particularly work on the ‘reframing’ of climate change as a health issue (Nisbet,
2009) and the resurrection of the ‘two-step-flow’ model of media influence and the
notion of opinion-leadership (Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955; Nisbet and Kotcher, 2009).
Reviewing the prominent frames characteristic of media and other public communica-
tion about climate change, Nisbet eloquently delineates the way forward as follows:

The typology of frames reviewed in this article suggests a deductive set of mental boxes and
interpretive storylines that can be used to bring diverse audiences together on common
ground, shape personal behavior, or mobilize collective action. Additional research using
in-depth interviews, focus groups, and sophisticated survey and experimental techniques
needs to further explore, identify, and test these frames across audiences. With so much
focus on media portrayals and advertising campaigns, it is also important not to overlook
interpersonal sources of information. One way to reach audiences is to recruit their influen-
tial peers to pass on selectively framed information about climate change that resonates with
the background of the targeted audience and that addresses their personal information
needs. (Nisbet, 2009: 9)

Putting this programme of research into action, Maibach et al. (2010) have begun to
show how the reframing of climate change communications as a health issue has empiri-
cally demonstrable implications for public perceptions, attitudes and potentially beha-
viour with regard to climate change mitigation.
While studies of media coverage and public opinion have amply demonstrated the dif-
ficulties and complexities of mapping their interaction, there is little doubt that the media
20 the International Communication Gazette 73(1-2)

serve as an important public reservoir of readily available images, meanings and

definitions about the environment. The media are an important public arena (Hilgartner
and Bosk, 1988), where different images and definitions – ‘sponsored’ by different agents,
groups and interested parties – compete and struggle with each other. Environmental
meanings, messages and definitions communicated in any one single medium, format or
genre are unlikely to exert a simple linear influence on public beliefs, understanding or
behaviour; but the media, in their broad and diverse totality, provide an important cultural
context from which various publics draw both vocabularies and frames of understanding
for making sense of the environment generally, and of claims about environmental prob-
lems more specifically. A key challenge for environmental communication research is to
empirically map the dynamic interaction of these – to use Gamson’s (1988) term, key
meaning-creating forums – and to further reconnect the study of public/political opinion
and action with the study of media communication about the environment. Research needs
to reconnect, within a clear articulation of communications theory and models, the careful
analysis of media/communications content with analysis of how different publics make
sense of, react, create meaning and take action (or not) with regard to public media and
communications messages about the environment.

Conclusion
Environmental communication research has come a long way in the last few decades,
on the one hand consolidating itself as a distinctive subfield of media and communi-
cation research, while at the same time healthily diversifying in terms of theoretical
frameworks, analytical approaches and types of media and communications processes
examined.
The main achievement is perhaps the considerable advances in the last two decades
towards an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the complex processes involved
in the social ‘construction’ of the environment as an issue for public concern. We now
know a great deal – although of course much remains to be done – about the news man-
agement, publicity and campaigning practices of environmental claims-makers, about
environmental journalists and environmental journalism, about the organizational and
economic pressures impinging on media organizations and their handling of the environ-
ment, and about the social, political and cultural implications of communication about
the environment.
Research on the communication strategies of sources and on source–journalist rela-
tionships has made important advances in terms of showing how successful claims-
making in society is closely related to the (economic and organizational) resources and
political power commanded by key claims-makers. Much media content research has
likewise referenced the ideological nature and implications of media coverage, and
indeed alluded to the inequalities and imbalances of power in public communication
demonstrated through the persistent imbalances in source-accessing and the framing
of different sources.
There is, however, a need to push this frame of enquiry significantly further both in
terms of uncovering the deeply ideological nature of public communication, but more
particularly, I would argue, in terms of uncovering how communicative ‘power’ in
Hansen 21

society is deeply unequally distributed. The task in this respect is to reconnect,

empirically and within clearly articulated theories and models of communication pro-
cesses, the study of the production, the content and the social/political implications of envi-
ronmental communication. And further, to demonstrate, building on the insights already
gained from research in each of these domains, how media and ‘mediated’ communication
about the environment and environmental controversy are invariably propelled/influenced
and manipulated by competing agencies and interests, which in turn have very different
degrees of power and very different communicative resources at their disposal. ‘Recon-
necting’ the three domains of research is thus not only a matter of strengthening our under-
standing of the dynamics which drive and impact on the processes of public
communication and the circulation of claims, but it is also a matter of showing how eco-
nomic, political and cultural power significantly affects the ability to participate in and
influence the nature of public ‘mediated’ communication about the environment.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

References
Ader CR (1995) A longitudinal-study of agenda-setting for the issue of environmental-pollution.
Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 72(2): 300–311.
Allan S (2002) Media, Risk and Science. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Allan S, Adam B and Carter C (eds) (2000) Environmental Risks and the Media. London:
Routledge.
Bauer M, Durant J and Gaskell G (eds) (1999) Biotechnology in the Public Sphere: A European
Source-Book. London: The Science Museum.
Beder S (2002) Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism, rev. edn. Totnes: Green
Books.
Besley JC and Shanahan J (2004) Skepticism about media effects concerning the environment:
Examining Lomborg’s hypotheses. Society and Natural Resources 17(10): 861–880.
Blumer H (1971) Social problems as collective behavior. Social Problems 18(3): 298–306.
Bousé D (2000) Wildlife Films. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Boyce T and Lewis J (eds) (2009) Media and Climate Change. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Boykoff MT (2009) We speak for the trees: Media reporting on the environment. Annual Review of
Environment and Resources 34: 431–457.
Boykoff MT and Rajan SR (2007) Signals and noise: Mass-media coverage of climate change in
the USA and the UK. Embo Reports 8(3): 207–211.
Brossard D, Shanahan J and McComas K (2004) Are issue-cycles culturally constructed? A com-
parison of French and American coverage of global climate change. Mass Communication and
Society 7(3): 359–377.
Burgess J (1990) The production and consumption of environmental meanings in the mass media:
A research agenda for the 1990s. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS15:
139–161.
Carvalho A (2007) Ideological cultures and media discourses on scientific knowledge: Re-reading
news on climate change. Public Understanding of Science 16(2): 223–243.
22 the International Communication Gazette 73(1-2)

Carvalho A (2008) Media(ted) discourse and society: Rethinking the framework of critical
discourse analysis. Journalism Studies 9(2): 161–177.
Corbett JB (2006) Communicating Nature: How We Create and Understand Environmental
Messages. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Corbett JB and Durfee JL (2004) Testing public (un) certainty of science: Media representations of
global warming. Science Communication 26(2): 129–151.
Cottle S (2000) TV news, lay voices and the visualisation of environmental risks. In: Allan S,
Adam B and Carter C (eds) Environmental Risks and the Media. London: Routledge, 29–44.
Cottle S (2009) Global Crisis Reporting: Journalism in the Global Age. Maidenhead: Open Uni-
versity Press.
Cox R (2010) Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere, 2nd edn. London: Sage.
Crawley CE (2007) Localized debates of agricultural biotechnology in community newspapers:
A quantitative content analysis of media frames and sources. Science Communication 28(3):
314–346.
Davis A (2007) The Mediation of Power: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.
Davis A (2008) Public relations in the news. In: Franklin B (ed.) Pulling Newspapers Apart: Ana-
lysing Print Journalism. London: Routledge, 272–281.
Dirikx A and Gelders D (2009) Global warming through the same lens: An exploratory framing
study in Dutch and French newspapers. In: Boyce T and Lewis J (eds) Media and Climate
Change. Oxford: Peter Lang, 200–210.
Downs A (1972) Up and down with ecology: The issue attention cycle. The Public Interest 28(3):
38–50.
Doyle J (2007) Picturing the clima(c)tic: Greenpeace and the representational politics of climate
change communication. Science as Culture 16(2): 129–150.
Dunwoody S and Griffin RJ (1993) Journalistic strategies for reporting long-term environmental
issues: A case study of three Superfund sites. In: Hansen A (ed.) The Mass Media and Environ-
mental Issues. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 22–50.
Entman RM (1993) Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communi-
cation 43(4): 51–58.
Ereaut G and Segnit N (2006) Warm words: How are we telling the Climate Story and can we tell
it better? Available at: www.ippr.org.uk/members/download.asp?f¼%2Fecomm%2Ffiles%
2Fwarm%5Fwords%2Epdf
Fairclough N (1989) Language and Power. London: Longman.
Friedman S (2004) And the beat goes on: The third decade of environmental journalism. In: Senecah
S, Depoe S, Neuzil M and Walker G (eds) The Environmental Communication Yearbook, Vol. 1.
London: Lawrence Erlbaum, 175–187.
Gaber I (2000) The greening of the public, politics and the press, 1985–1999. In: Smith J (ed.) The
Daily Globe: Environmental Change, the Public and the Media. London: Earthscan Publica-
tions, 115–126.
Gamson WA (1988) A constructionist approach to mass media and public opinion. Symbolic
Interaction 11(2): 161–174.
Gamson WA and Modigliani A (1989) Media discourse and public opinion on nuclear power:
A constructionist approach. American Journal of Sociology 95(1): 1–37.
Gans HJ (1979) Deciding What’s News. New York: Vintage.
Gold JR and Revill G (2004) Representing the Environment. London: Routledge.
Hansen 23

Good JE (2009) The cultivation, mainstreaming, and cognitive processing of environmentalists

watching television. Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 3(3):
279–297.
Gutteling JM (2005) Mazur’s hypothesis on technology controversy and media. International
Journal of Public Opinion Research 17(1): 23–41.
Hannigan JA (2006) Environmental Sociology, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.
Hansen A (ed.) (1993) The Mass Media and Environmental Issues. Leicester: Leicester University
Press.
Hansen A (2009) Science, communication and media. In: Holliman R, Whitelegg E, Scanlon E,
Smidt S and Thomas J (eds) Investigating Science Communication in the Information Age:
Implications for Public Engagement and Popular Media. Milton Keynes: Oxford University
Press and the Open University, 105–127.
Hansen A (2010) Environment, Media and Communication. London: Routledge.
Hansen A and Linné O (1994) Journalistic practices and television coverage of the environment:
An international comparison. In: Hamelink C and Linne O (eds) Mass Communication
Research: On Problems and Policies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 369–383.
Hansen A and Machin D (2008) Visually branding the environment: Climate change as a market-
ing opportunity. Discourse Studies 10(6): 777–794.
Hilgartner S and Bosk CL (1988) The rise and fall of social problems: A public arenas model.
American Journal of Sociology 94(1): 53–78.
Ibarra PR and Kitsuse JI (1993) Vernacular constituents of moral discourse: An interactionist
proposal for the study of social problems. In: Holstein JA and Miller G (eds) Reconsidering
Social Constructionism: Debates in Social Problems Theory. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de
Gruyter, 25–58.
Ingram D (2000) Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema. Exeter: University of
Exeter Press.
Iyengar S (1991) Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues. Chicago, IL:
Chicago University Press.
Katz E and Lazarsfeld PF (1955) Personal Influence. New York: The Free Press.
Lester L (2010) Media and Environment. Cambridge: Polity.
Lester L and Cottle S (2009) Visualizing climate change: Television news and ecological citizen-
ship. International Journal of Communication 3: 920–936.
Lewis J, Williams A and Franklin B (2008) A compromised fourth estate? UK news journalism,
public relations and news sources. Journalism Studies 9(1): 1–20.
Linder SH (2006) Cashing-in on risk claims: On the for-profit inversion of signifiers for ‘global
warming’. Social Semiotics 16(1): 103–132.
McGaurr L and Lester L (2009) Complementary problems, competing risks: Climate change,
nuclear energy, and the Australian. In: Boyce T and Lewis J (eds) Media and Climate Change.
Oxford: Peter Lang, 174–185.
Maibach EW, Nisbet M, Baldwin P, Akerlof K and Diao G (2010) Reframing climate change as a
public health issue: An exploratory study of public reactions. BMC Public Health 10(299).
Mazur A (1990) Nuclear power, chemical hazards, and the quantity of reporting. Minerva 28(3):
294–323.
Meister M and Japp PM (2002) Enviropop: Studies in Environmental Rhetoric and Popular
Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger/Greenwood Press.
24 the International Communication Gazette 73(1-2)

Moser SC and Dilling L (eds) (2007) Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate
Change and Facilitating Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nisbet M (2009) Communicating climate change: Why frames matter for public
engagement. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development. Available at:
www.environmentmagazine.org/March-April%202009/Nisbet-full.html
Nisbet MC and Kotcher JE (2009) A two-step flow of influence? Opinion-leader campaigns on
climate change. Science Communication 30(3): 328–354.
Nisbet MC and Lewenstein BV (2002) Biotechnology and the American media: The policy pro-
cess and the elite press, 1970 to 1999. Science Communication 23(4): 359–391.
Ryan C (1991) Prime Time Activism: Media Strategies for Grassroots Organizing. Boston, MA:
South End Press.
Sachsman DB (1976) Public relations influence on coverage of environment in San Francisco
Area. Journalism Quarterly 53(1): 54–60.
Sachsman DB, Simon J and Valenti JM (2006) Regional issues, national norms: A four-region
analysis of US environment reporters. Science Communication 28(1): 93–121.
Scheufele DA (1999) Framing as a theory of media effects. Journal of Communication 49(1):
103–122.
Scheufele DA and Tewksbury D (2007) Framing, agenda setting, and priming: The evolution of
three media effects models. Journal of Communication 57(1): 9–20.
Schneider JW (1985) Social problems theory: The constructionist view. Annual Review of
Sociology 11: 209–229.
Schoenfeld AC, Meier RF and Griffin RJ (1979) Constructing a social problem: The press and the
environment. Social Problems 27(1): 38–61.
Schudson M (1989) The sociology of news production. Media, Culture and Society 11(3):
263–282.
Seppänen J and Väliverronen E (2003) Visualising biodiversity: The role of photographs in envi-
ronmental discourse. Science as Culture 12(1): 59–85.
Shanahan J (1993) Television and the cultivation of environmental concern: 1988–92. In:
Hansen A (ed.) The Mass Media and Environmental Issues. Leicester: Leicester University
Press, 181–197.
Shanahan J and McComas K (1999) Nature Stories: Depictions of the Environment and their
Effects. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
Signitzer B and Prexl A (2007) Communication strategies of ‘greenwash trackers’: How activist
groups attempt to hold companies accountable and to promote sustainable development. Paper
presented at the IAMCR Conference, Paris, 23–25 July.
Solesbury W (1976) The environmental agenda: An illustration of how situations may become
political issues and issues may demand responses from government; or how they may not.
Public Administration 54(4): 379–397.
Soroka SN (2002) Issue attributes and agenda-setting by media, the public, and policymakers in
Canada. International Journal of Public Opinion Research 14(3): 264–285.
Spector M and Kitsuse JI (1973) Social problems: A reformulation. Social Problems 21(2): 145–159.
Stern N (2006) Stern review on the economics of climate change. Available at: www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/
sternreview_index.htm
Taylor CE, Lee JS and Davie WR (2000) Local press coverage of environmental conflict. Journal-
ism and Mass Communication Quarterly 77(1): 175–192.
Hansen 25

Trench B (2009) Science reporting in the electronic embrace of the internet. In: Holliman R,
Whitelegg E, Scanlon E, Smidt S and Thomas J (eds) Investigating Science Communication
in the Information Age: Implications for Public Engagement and Popular Media. Milton
Keynes: Oxford University Press and the Open University, 166–180.
Trumbo C (1995) Longitudinal modelling of public issues: An application of the agenda-setting pro-
cess to the issue of global warming. Journalism and Mass Communication Monographs 152.
Uscinski JE (2009) When does the public’s issue agenda affect the media’s issue agenda (and vice-
versa)? Developing a framework for media–public influence. Social Science Quarterly 90(4):
796–815.
Von Storch H and Krauss W (2005) Culture contributes to perceptions of climate change. Nieman
Reports 59(4): 99–102.
Wakefield SEL and Elliott SJ (2003) Constructing the news: The role of local newspapers in envi-
ronmental risk communication. Professional Geographer 55(2): 216–226.
Walgrave S, Soroka S and Nuytemans M (2008) The mass media’s political agenda-setting power:
A longitudinal analysis of media, parliament, and government in Belgium (1993 to 2000) Com-
parative Political Studies 41(6): 814–836.
Wallack L, Woodruff K, Dorfman L and Diaz I (1999) News for a Change: An Advocate’s Guide to
Working with the Media. London: Sage.
Zucker HG (1978) The variable nature of news media influence. In: Ruben BD (ed.) Communica-
tion Yearbook, Vol. 2. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 225–240.