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.
Newspaper coverage of science is governed and shaped by both macro-level factors such as ownership and cultural resonances, and by the more micro-level factors of journalistic practices, professional values, and organizational arrangements. This study examines the characteristics and professional practices of specialist journalists involved in the coverage of science, medicine and related subjects in the British national press. It shows that they share many of their characteristics with specialist journalists in other areas: they value journalistic professionalism and skill more highly than formal training in their particular field of specialist reporting; they deploy conventional news-value criteria, but emphasize in particular the importance of a `relevance to the reader' criterion in the selection of science news; they deploy elaborate routines for securing the credibility of their reporting, including the active cultivation of a relationship of mutual trust with their sources, and a source-orientation which is distinctly institutionally- and authority-focused. Popular and quality press journalists hold clearly different images of their target audiences, although for both categories of journalists the image of the readers owes more to journalistic judgement and casual feedback than to systematic readership data. The overriding key to understanding the work of these specialists is to recognize that they are, in their practices and professional beliefs, journalists first and specialists second.
Offering an introduction to key research methods and approaches for the study of media and mass communications processes, this book starts with a discussion on how to select the right methods for the right research questions, before going on to outline the main methods and approaches for the study of: media organisations; the practices of media professionals; media content and representations; and media audiences. Drawing widely on examples from communications research literature, the authors describe the development and application of each method and the details of the steps involved, giving examples of research instruments as appropriate.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.