Representing climate change on public service television: A case study

Abstract

Publicly funded broadcasters with a track record in science programming would appear ideally placed to represent climate change to the lay public. Free from the constraints of vested interests and the economic imperative, public service providers are better equipped to represent the scientific, social and economic aspects of climate change than commercial media, where ownership conglomeration, corporate lobbyists and online competition have driven increasingly tabloid coverage with an emphasis on controversy. This prime-time snapshot of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's main television channel explores how the structural/rhetorical conventions of three established public service genres - a science programme, a documentary and a live public affairs talk show - impact on the representation of anthropogenic climate change. The study findings note implications for public trust, and discuss possibilities for innovation in the interests of better public understanding of climate change.

مواقع التواصل الاجتماعي ونشر الذعر بين البالغين حيال تغير المناخ

“…The portrayal of climate change in the television coverage of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's main television channel was also addressed in the (Debrett, 2015) study. It was revealed that the audience believed the coverage and had trusted and understood climate change because of the information broadcast.…”

Dispersion and Disparity: Bibliometric and Visualized Analysis of Research on Climate Change Science Communication

“…Media presentation has emergent words at different stages, which we believe is largely attributable to the iterations of media technology and related to the important role that the media has assumed in public-facing climate communication. Newspapers, television, news, and social media became the arenas for studying climate communication practices [ 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 ]. In general, the early areas of climate communication research were more focused, and after 2004, the areas of research have become more dispersed and diverse.…”

Voicing climate change? Television, public engagement and the politics of voice

“…However, in spite of the prominence of documentary film-making in making climate change public, there has been relatively little research into this compared to the fairly extensive and long-running studies of print journalism, and some work on broadcast journalism. Exceptions include Boykoff and Goodman (2009), Debrett (2015), Goodman and Littler (2013) and Smith (2005Smith ( , 2017. Furthermore, in the field of climate change, there is no direct parallel to Davies' (2000) work on natural history or Brockington's (2008) work on conservation programme production.…”