Framing news on risk industries: Local journalism and conditioning factors

Abstract

This work describes the results obtained from a study of the journalistic handling of news related to the petrochemical industrial complex in the area of Tarragona (Spain), one of the most important such complexes in Europe. The research questions referred to how and in which sense the petrochemical industry is reported in the local newspapers and which conditioning factors must be taken into account to understand this treatment. The author applied frame analysis to a corpus of 1337 news items, conducted in-depth interviews with selected journalists, and analysed vocabulary choices and information sources. The results show that the industry was largely framed in economic terms and that almost three-quarters of the news articles on the sector were framed positively. The study highlights the fact that proximity is a conditioning factor that affects how journalists work, and points to the social and political context as a strong influence on how discourse regarding petrochemical risk develops.

The Mediating Role of the News in the BP Oil Spill Crisis 2010

“…To answer the research question, we investigate whether and how journalists react to actual financial performance indicators (Castelló, 2010) and public relation efforts (Kiousis et al, 2007). Second, we analyze the effects of the U.S. news on public awareness (classic agenda-setting; for example, McCombs, 2004; McCombs & Shaw, 1972), on foreign news media (intermedia agenda-setting; for example, Farnsworth, Soroka, & Young, 2010; Vliegenthart & Walgrave, 2008), and on stock prices (stakeholder-agenda-setting, for example, Scheufele, Haas, & Brosius, 2011; Tetlock, 2007).…”

On the communicative constitution of risk objects in mediated times

“…Whilst we are in agreement about the nature of the problem, individually we are addressing it by means of different approaches. Farré and colleagues in Tarragona (Farré and Gonzalo 2008;Castelló 2010) are pursuing a programme of work that is centrally concerned with a conceptual framework (or, more accurately, a meta-model) of risk communication. This meta-model, or 'model of models', encapsulates elements of other risk communication models, including the social amplification framework that we have already mentioned, the Bourdieu-inspired 'field of contest' model (Petts et al 2001), and the formal models discussed critically in the paper in this collection by Espluga et al In theoretical terms, it draws on developments in communications theory introduced by Craig (1999Craig ( , 2007, in which he has sought to create coherence among diverse conceptualizations and approaches in that literature by the introduction of what he calls a constitutive meta-model, an important feature of which is a perspective that views communication as a primary process through which actors construct meanings about social categories and actions.…”

“…How can one understand the nature of risk communication in a world characterized by such pervasive influences? Proceeding by analogy with the celebrated linguistic (or hermeneutic) 'turn' in the humanities and social sciences (Bryant 1995), in which language use came to be seen as in part constitutive of the objects of its concern, one of us had already coined the expression 'the communicative turn in risk communication' (Farré and Gonzalo 2008; see also Castelló 2010). With this special issue we have attempted to develop this idea.…”

The green battle in the media: A framing analysis of environmental press coverage

“…The one environmental area that has enjoyed the most attention in this sense is climate change (see, for instance, Carvalho, 2008;Maibach, Nisbet, Baldwin, Akerlof & Diao, 2010;Nisbet, 2009Nisbet, , 2010or Pan, Opgenhaffe & Van Gorp, 2019). In Spain, despite the fact that most framing studies in the field of communication have been related to social or political communication matters (see, for instance, Cheng, Igartua, Palacions, Acosta & Palito, 2010;or Valera Ordaz & López García, 2014), we can also find some works focusing on environmental issues such as environmental disasters (Vicente-Mariño, 2010), climate change (Lopera & Moreno, 2014), natural spaces (Mateu & Domínguez, 2017) or risk communication (Castelló, 2010).…”