The Effect of News Media on Public Opinion Toward Environmental Issues

Introduction

Environmental issues such as global warming, pollution and wildlife preservation have been a concern for the scientific community for decades. However, it is only recently that public awareness of such issues is increasing, with the proportion of Americans who say that global warming is either personally “extremely essential” or “very essential” increasing from 27 percent in 1997 to 52 percent in 2007 (Nisbet & Myers, 2007). This can be partially attributed to the changes in the way news media has portrayed these issues, along with other media and real-world events. The news serves to identify issues that are important, works as a platform for advocacy and change, and provides information for civic participation and autonomy. Without doubt, agenda setting and framing are the most influential theories in media effects that allow these functions to happen.

Therefore, this paper will be looking at the ways in which news portrayal has changed to greater influence public opinion toward environmental issues. This will be done by secondary research of scholarly journal and newspaper articles. It will analyze statistics detailing changes in frequency, prominence, and length of news reports and articles, as well as journal articles studying the changes in content and reporting Style of articles, and employ these to support the theories regarding effects of mass communication that help to elaborate the power of the news media. In addition, polls documenting public concept towards environmental issues over the past two decades will be analyzed and discussed.

All this is spicy because the average person does not notice the influence that news media has. The thought that the order of the evening news had been planned by someone beforehand probably never crosses the minds of many people, and one automatically assumes that the top stories are the ones one should pay most attention to. The purpose of this research paper is to show how strongly news media can influence people – intentionally or otherwise – in terms of their thinking and behavior, the factors that come into play for this to happen more effectively, and the result of this influence. In addition, this paper will suggest how it can be better used to give legal information while having a greater effect on individual opinion, such that the goals of environmentalists and/or the government can be reached.

Findings and Discussion

Changes in portrayal of environmental issues over the past decade
Firstly, environmental issues can be categorized into soft news, as they have no immediate significance on people. Unfortunately, environmental issues can be further placed into many categories, and therefore news media relies on news themes to organize all the news regarding environmental issues that exists. When using environmental themes, media gatekeepers are able to label one story as an environmental story and another as something else (Corbett, 1998), and someone else might label the stories differently. The media thus exercises a degree of social control when defining social problems, and what the public sees as being important is determined by the media, instead of the other diagram round.

The typical reader or viewer does not give undivided attention to news reports, and rarely absorbs them in their entirety. Impressions of a news report may be formed from scanning its headline, an accompanying picture and its caption, or by the visuals on the television screen. As a result, if an article is on the front page, or if there are more and longer articles on a positive topic, there is a higher chance of such articles being read. A study analyzed the distribution of environmental news articles by year, average length and prominence score over a twenty-year period from 1970 to 1990 (Ader, 1995). While the average frequency of such articles decreased from approximately 160 in 1970 to 93 in 1990, average length and prominence score increased dramatically from 11 to 19 and 1.9 to 3.15 respectively. More importantly, all this is despite the fact that the total pollution index, one of the major environmental issues, over this same period of time has steadily declined.

Communication scholar James W. Tankard, Jr. defines the concept of framing as “the central organizing idea for news content that supplies a context and suggests what the reveal is through the use of selection, emphasis, exclusion, and elaboration”. As a result, the media are able to tell us what to believe by focusing attention on a particular angle of a story. Therefore, the portrayal of environmental issues as doomsday reports in the news would suggest to the public to think of environmental issues as serious and imminent. For example, Time magazine’s April 3, 2006 shroud story emphasized that global warming has brought the Earth to a ‘tipping point’ (Nolan, 2006). Activists who have watched the issue evolve also say that the credibility given to opponents is waning, which entails the aspects of exclusion. This potentially means that readers may not be getting an upright picture of the situation, regardless of how severe it may actually be.

In addition, there is a heavy selective reliance by the media on information provided by governmental and corporate arenas rather than scientific sources in order to provide planned and more consistent information to audiences. As a paper by Julia B. Corbett quoted McCartney in 1997, increased public interest and longer news timeslots have created more pressure to acquire newscasts with viewer-friendly “news lite” but with fewer resources (Corbett, 1998). Bureaucracies are best able to meet this need because they have personnel who are assigned to produce and deliver information regarding prescheduled news, allowing the media to plan ahead and reduce the inherent uncertainty of the news business. We can understand the incompatibility it makes when recalling anecdotes of scientific reports from popular magazines such as Readers Digest that seesaw from telling us that coffee is good for us, then bad, and then good for us again in a matter of months.

How environmental issues have increased in importance in the public agenda
Nearly all news stories are first brought to widespread attention by one or more of a small, central group of large news organizations such as major wire services and news magazines, and especially The New York Times(Mazur & Lee, 1993). Flipping through Singapore’s The Straits Times, one will stare that many of the articles published come from Reuters or the Associated Press. Many of the videos we see on television news are also taken from other countries’ news programs. Therefore, if on any given period of time, these news organizations decide that environmental issues are important and create many reports on it, many newspapers all over the world will determine to Cover environmental issues using these reports. Both coverage and deliver is then achieved.

Agenda-setting theory is the most current way in which we explain how the news influences us. In 1922, Walter Lippmann illustrious that the media shape people’s perceptions of that which they cannot experience directly by re-creating it. The environment, in most cases, is one such issue which demonstrates a strong agenda-setting effect (Ader, 1995). News coverage of issues helps to clarify for the public what to think about, and if news editors decide to put certain stories on the headlines, those are the issues that the public will think are most important, without considering who decided that these stories should be on the headlines in the first place.

However, researchers Allan Mazur and Jinling Lee from Syracuse University suggest that it is not a very noteworthy concept because it is limited to the most elemental media effect of raising an assure to salience. They suggest using quantity of coverage theory, an elaboration of agenda setting, which posits that increased coverage of an issue not only makes the risk salient, but also turns public opinion in a negative direction, in this case causing heightened fear of environmental hazards. This is in contrast to the concept of framing, which relies on the content of a fable, as discussed in the previous section, but both these concepts explain the change in opinion more than they do awareness.

Not surprisingly, the individual influence that news has is based on various factors, such as one’s level of education and interest in international news. A world public opinion survey (2007) showed that 60 percent of individuals who are very interested in international news view global warming as a critical threat, whereas only 42 percent of respondents who do not follow the news think so. This supports what we learnt about Cacioppo and Petty’s (1982) concept that definite people have a higher need for cognition than others.

The impact this has on public opinion
The public has generally grown more concerned about environmental issues over the years. This can be explained using Comstock’s Psychological Model of Individual Media Effects, where concern increases as the perceived reality of the media increases. Although staunch world environmental events are not correlated with media and public agenda, they add to the reality of news reports because the environmental issues reported in the news have no tangible effect on the individual until these events happen (Ader, 1995). For instance, arctic ice melts due to global warming currently do not affect us in any intention. However, in Singapore, one can often feel the tangible consequence of Indonesia’s environmentally wicked traditional slash-and-burn agricultural practice, which is air pollution in the form of haze.

Public opinion of environmental issues has tended towards government responsibility. This can be attributed to the fact that news stories often hold the government responsible for taking action to fight global warming and other environmental issues. An animated article by The Current York Times even suggests that “the reveal that will and should unite the West is energy and all its challenges”, and that climate change and energy will soon move to the heart of the Atlantic alliance’s agenda (Friedman, 2006). More importantly, a study of an environmental segment on a television newscast in the United States showed that 54.1 percent of the stories were centered in the government arena (Corbett, 1998), such as coverage of the unusual Bali summit in December 2007. In addition, many of the laws made by governments apply to businesses rather than the public, such as laws preventing factories from dumping toxic slay into the sea.

Interestingly, when polls in 2007 posed the question of taxing electricity and gasoline so that people used less, the majority of respondents opposed such a measure (Nisbet & Myers, 2007). However, in Japan, various city laws dictate via detailed rules that household trash must be sorted into different categories, to the extent of separating lipstick from their tubes. Yokohama city even stopped putting garbage bins in parks to prevent errant owners from dumping their unsorted trash there (Onishi, 2005). Increasingly, the public also expects businesses to practice corporate social responsibility. The same television newscast study as quoted above showed that the public and businesses shared about the same coverage in terms of involvement, 12.3 percent and 11 percent respectively (Corbett, 1998). A suggestion for this could be that individuals can then participate in green consumerism and living while advocating environmentally friendly businesses, all without having to make a conscious effort. However, more research needs to be done to support this idea.

On the other hand, although public awareness towards environmental issues may change, this may not constitute a consequent change in opinion simply because of news portrayal. Firstly, although strong headlines may put an issue foremost on one’s mind, one may not be able to remember the details that assist to build agendas. In a study by researchers Robinson and Davis (1986), it was found that most viewers of news could “recall something but then can give no details” or could provide only “vague, general responses related to the story”. Second, people often practice selective exposure, reading a message through the rose-tinted glasses of their acquire attitudes, interests, beliefs, and values. Even though more and more people feel that environmental issues are becoming increasingly critical, opinions on what should be done about these issues can differ greatly, as can be seen from the varying statistics of polls over the years (Nisbet & Myers, 2007).

Inciting public action
As seen from the above section, news media does not seem to emphasize individual responsibility toward the environment, which is understandable to a certain extent, given the criteria made by Jamieson and Campbell (1988) and Harris (1999) which define what news is. News has to be a proper, credible event or issue. It has to be dramatic, recent, and of danger to most news consumers. Therefore, few events emphasize individual responsibility and fit these criteria at the same time. One such event would be Earth Hour, held this year on March 29, which encourages people all over the world to turn off the lights for one hour in order to set electricity. News coverage of this event has probably resulted in greater participation by individuals all over the world.

Another way in which news media can incite change is to publicize news regarding the environmental actions of firms, rather than activist events, such that individuals can take piece on a daily basis. For example, news media can portray about how definite companies use packaging that comes from sustainable forests, such that one can resolve to engage from that company. This also results in positive publicity for such firms and could perhaps encourage firms to buy up socially responsible marketing. However, this could also lead to the social issue of biased news, especially in news companies which are owned by conglomerates. Once again, more research needs to be done to determine if these suggestions will be potentially useful.

Conclusion

What has been presented is an in-depth analysis that shows how news media portrayal has been able to affect a great positive change public opinion of environmental issues and how it can be improved, regardless of whether or not the information presented is accurate or objective. As a result, there arises the ethical issue of whether news media should provide information that is legal and reliable or use less accurate information to incite greater change in public action, since the portrayal of such reports is already powerful enough to set and build the public agenda and opinion. Putting this aside, news media also has the potential to influence the actions of businesses. A study in the Republic of Korea found that the publication of environmental news in newspapers along with the firm’s awareness of this news publication is the key predictor of environmental performance (Mamingi, Dasgupta, Laplante, & Hong, 2006). Therefore, this area of news media effects can be explored in greater detail.

Further studies could be conducted in the area of how firms’ actions toward corporate social responsibility have influenced consumer attitudes and action toward environmental issues, especially in terms of cognitive dissonance theory. One example is how furniture company Ikea’s policy of using reusable bags and asking customers to pay for plastic bags has changed these customers’ behavior towards green living. Customers who often do not bring their own reusable bags have no choice but to pay for a plastic bag, since they feel that they wouldn’t bring the reusable bag again anyway. However, they come away from the experience feeling that they have made a contribution to living green, even though plastic bags are still being used. This could then lead to research on whether such companies are truly embracing environmental responsibility or trying to make a buck from it.

The strengths of the material presented are that there is substantial primary research which shows the impact of news media on public opinion and how this is done. Here, I have managed to bring together theory and proof to explain this aspect of media effects, as well as discuss how it can be improved. However, what has been discussed so far does not discuss the discrepancies between public opinion and actual action taken by individuals. This is highly important in determining whether news media’s influence can result in behavioral change. If possible, comparison between news and other mass media, such as public service campaigns and Film, should be done to study the differences in their portrayal of environmental issues as well as determine which form has the greatest influence on public opinion. Also, it would be beneficial to study the correlation between media and public agenda versus action taken in order to choose the effectiveness of news media in inciting behavioral change.

References

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Corbett, J.B. (1998). The environment as theme and package on a local television newscast. Science Communication, 19, 222-237.

Friedman, T.L. (2006, October 27). Allies dressed in green. The Novel York Times, Allotment A; pg. 19. Retrieved March 3, 2008, from Lexis-Nexis database.

Mamingi, N., Dasgupta, S., Laplante, B., & Hong, J.H. (2006). Firms’ environmental performance: does news matter? World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3888. Retrieved March 2, 2008, from http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2006/04/17/000016406_20060417172424/Rendered/PDF/wps3888.pdf

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Nisbet, M.C., & Myers, T. (2007). The polls trends: twenty years of public notion about global warming. Public Opinion Quarterly, 71(3), 444-470.

Onishi, N. (2005, May 12). How do Japanese dump trash? Let us count the myriad ways. The New York Times, Foreign Desk; pg. 1. Retrieved April 4, 2007, from Lexis-Nexis database.

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