Media coverage of sustainable development issues – attention cycles or punctuated equilibrium?

Abstract

Over the last two decades there has been a marked change in the way that the public perceives environmental issues and the concepts associated with sustainable development. Few would argue that this has moved into the mainstream of public consciousness. Coverage of sustainability related concepts within the media, as illustrated by a sample of 112 worldwide newspapers, shows a clear upward trajectory. Taking the example of climate change and sustainable development, this paper explores this increasing coverage, and arguably awareness, of sustainability concepts, and considers parallels with the concepts of punctuated equilibrium and issue-attention cycles.

Media coverage of climate change: An international comparison

“…In 2007 the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report and the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the IPCC (Barkemeyer et al, 2009;Holt and Barkemeyer, 2012) elevated climate change to the status of a global media event. In many countries, media attention to climate change peaked in around this time, followed by a decline in subsequent years (Schmidt et al, 2013).…”

NGOs in the News: The Road to Taken-for-Grantedness

“…The coding scheme was also rather cumbersome to work with; future studies might modify or simplify the scheme to make it an easier tool with which to work. Additionally, the study does not provide causal evidence for the peak of coverage in the middle 2000s; whether events such as the 2004 tsunami across Indonesia or Hurricane Katrina and the Kyoto Protocol in 2005 resulted in peaks in news coverage attention cycles (Holt and Barkemeyer 2010) might be a topic for future research.…”

“…In addition, the two newspapers are considered elite media outlets Voluntas (2016Voluntas ( ) 27:2734Voluntas ( -2763Voluntas ( 2743 which can both reflect and impact legitimacy (Deegan et al 2002;Deephouse and Suchman 2008;Vergne 2011). They have the ability to set the agenda for policy makers and the public (Carvalho and Burgess 2005;Holt and Barkemeyer 2010;Islam and Deegan 2010;Jordan 1993;Mazur and Lee 1993) as well as other news sources (Nisbet and Huge 2006). Thus, although the newspapers may cater to a different readership and present a different focus-'center, right business' versus 'liberal news story and editorial'-they were chosen for this study due to their agenda-setting capacity.…”

Contrast of the journalistic coverage of climate change and global warming in Spain and in the international sphere: IV-V IPCC Reports and Bali-Copenhagen-Paris

“…Subsequently, numerous nations have joined the field of research. Some research has focused on the study of international coverage in a comparative way (Holt and Barkemeyer, 2012); Boykoff et al (2004Boykoff et al ( -2017 [1]; Schmidt et al, (2013 Quesada and Teruel, 2013;Caceres, Sánchez and Morales, 2012;Domínguez, Lafita and Mateu, 2016;Erviti y León, 2017;Erviti, 2013;Fernández Parrat, 2009;Fernández-Reyes, Piñuel and Vicente-Mariño, 2015;Fernández-Reyes, 2009;Leon and Erviti, 2015;Lopera, 2013;Lopera and Moreno, 2014;Lozano, Sánchez y Morales, 2017;Lozano, 2013;Piñuel, Gaitán and Lozano, 2012;Quesada, Blanco y Teruel, 2015;Reig and Alcaide, 2007;Rueda, 2014;Teso 2015, among other investigations. It has also been addressed in collective works such as ), Fernández-Reyes and Mancina-Chavez (2013), Fernández-Reyes and Tourinho (2013, ), Piñuel (2013, León (2014a, b) Piñuel (2016, Fernández-Reyes R, Piñuel J.L, Tourinho I.M.…”