TABLE OF CONTENTS
PRELIMINARY REPORT FROM THE MACKENZIE BASIN IMPACT STUDY (MBIS) FINAL WORKSHOP
BIODIVERSITY -- WHY SHOULD WE CARE?
CGCP NOW
ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT PROJECT
FISHERIES PANEL
IS GLOBAL WARMING STILL WORTH A BLIP?
THE IAI INTITIAL SCIENCE PROGRAM AND THE IAI START-UP GRANTS
CANADIANS AWARDED IAI GRANTS
HUMAN DIMENSIONS STUDENTSHIP AWARDED BY ROYAL CANADIAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
CCP INFO
MCGILL'S C2GCR APPOINTS NEW DIRECTOR
START OFFERS FELLOWSHIP AND VISITING LECTURER PROGRAMES
CANADIAN ASSOCIATION OF PHYSICIANS FOR THE ENVIRONMENT
ROYAL SOCIETY MEDAL AWARDED FOR NEW WASTE MANAGEMENT PROCESS
GLOBAL CHANGE GAMES ON PARLIAMENT HILL
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
EVENTS CALENDAR
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IS GLOBAL WARMING STILL WORTH A BLIP?
A Study of Media Coverage in Three Countries
Sheldon Ungar
Division of Social Sciences, Scarborough Campus
University of Toronto
Stephen Schneider's query — Does the greenhouse effect exist only in the micro chips of a supercomputer? — goes to the heart of the publicity problem of global warming. Since the latter lacks a smoking gun akin to the Antarctic ozone hole, the media play a critical role in determining its standing on the public, political and policy agendas. Thus research suggests that the frenzy of media coverage that followed the "greenhouse summer of 1988" and the subsequent Exxon Valdez oil spill put global environmental issues in the air and catalysed the actions taken at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.1 An issue is most likely to command attention when a surge of media coverage arises from actual events of considerable consequence. These conditions not only animate public interest but cause the issue to spill over into other arenas where it must be addressed.
Since there are countless social problems competing for scarce media attention, the few issues that achieve high visibility typically enjoy only a short burst of attention.2 Most social problems, however, do not simply rise and fall.
Rather, agenda-setting is an iterative process. Problems can re-emerge as high visibility issues, or they can decline without ever vanishing, and thereafter receive fluctuating quantities of attention. Certainly global warming has been subject to the issue attention cycle. By 1990, it had lost its high visibility standing and became a routine social problem that received sporadic — and often critical — coverage. The Earth Summit, however, brought another swell of attention to the issue.
Here I report on newspaper coverage of the Berlin Conference in three countries. There were several reasons for believing that the conference was a good candidate for generating the interest and widespread discussion of a high visibility issue. Though not quite on the scale of the Rio Summit, the Berlin Conference was attended by 170-odd nations and was the First Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Beyond having to deal with several controversial issues, the conference was also linked to actual events. The summer before the conference witnessed such abnormal heat waves throughout Eurasia that the media began to speak of "strange weather".3 Dramatic increases in weather-related insurance losses further indicated that something was awry.4
Finally, in the weeks preceding the start of the conference there was evidence that, as one editorial hyperbolically observed, "Antarctica is cracking up".5 That is, there were reports of a huge iceberg the size of Luxembourg breaking off the Larsen ice shelf. Further reports noted a 64-kilometer-long crack in the northernmost portion of the Larsen ice shelf.
In this context, this study tracked newspaper coverage of the 11-day Berlin Conference (Tuesday, March 28 to Friday, April 7, 1995) from the weekend preceding its start through the weekend following its finish. The sample was composed of 18 quality national newspapers, six each from Britain, the U.S. and Canada.6 Fortunately or not, the start of the conference coincided with an international environmental incident. The dispute between Canada and the European Union over fishing rights in the nose and tail of the Grand Banks peaked with the Canadian seizure of a Spanish fishing trawler. Given these overlapping events, this study uses the fish dispute for comparative purposes.
Figure 1 shows the total coverage in the 18-newspaper sample of the two events for each day of the designated research period. As can be seen, the fish dispute captured a great deal of attention after the 27th, and for five of the next six days, the number of articles exceeded the number of newspapers in the sample. Subsequently, coverage dropped to a lower average, around which it fluctuated. In contrast, the Berlin Conference did not receive the sustained surge of attention found in the turbot dispute. Coverage peaked the day before the conference began and the day after it ended. During the conference, coverage was quite modest. The drop off on the last day is not misleading. A reduced sample of eight newspapers revealed only four post-mortem articles on the conference in the next two weeks. In this period, the reduced sample revealed over 30 articles on the turbot issue.
{{INSERT FIGURE 1 HERE}}
In comparison with the fish dispute, Berlin received only routine coverage. Whereas the latter attracted two front-page stories, the fish dispute garners 28. Less than 25% of the stories on the Berlin Conference included a picture or graph, as compared with 55% of the fish stories. The fish dispute also created a memorable image when Brian Tobin, the Canadian Minister of Fisheries, unveiled an illegal Spanish net used to catch undersized turbot.
Figure 2 shows the daily coverage of the conference in the three countries. Clearly, the Berlin Conference attracted the most coverage in Britain (55 articles), followed by Canada (36 articles), and then the U.S. (17 articles). Since Canada was the main player in the fish dispute, there is an expected reversal of Canadian (136 articles) and British (77 articles) coverage of this issue (Figure not shown). Again, the U.S. trails badly (26 articles).
{{INSERT FIGURE 2 HERE}}
Closer examination of Figure 2 reveals that the peak coverage found at the outset of the conference (see Figure 1) is entirely due to reporting in Canada and Britain. Heavy initial coverage in Britain declined during the middle of the conference, and then peaked again as the conference ended. Canadian coverage is somewhat different, with peaks at the start, during, and at the end of the conference. U.S. coverage revealed no peaks and five days without any articles.
Low overall coverage in the U.S. partially masks a deeper lack of attention. Besides four New York Times articles, the bulk of the coverage came from the International Herald Tribune and USA Today. Since both of these papers aim at international audiences, it is to be expected that they would provide more coverage. Still, one-third of the articles in these two papers are news briefs. In addition, while the three-nation sample included two front-page articles, four full-pages of devoted coverage, and about half-a-dozen each of editorials and letters-to-the-editor, only one of these came from the U.S. (an editorial in USA Today).
Altogether, then, the Berlin Conference fell well below the level of sustained visibility and debate needed to achieve high visibility status. Perusal of the content of the articles revealed that the issue did not cross over to national political and policy arenas. That is, although all three nations are likely to fall short of the emission control targets set out at Rio, there was no incumbency on politicians or others to defend their positions. In contrast, national policies and actions were major media concerns during the "greenhouse summer of 1988", the Rio Summit, and the fish dispute.
While much of the research on the media focuses on its agenda-setting effects, the present results suggest that media attention may itself reflect broader societal concern about an issue. Thus the quantity of coverage in each of the countries parallels declared plans for action on global warming: Britain, as did most other members of the European Union, proposed emission reductions rather than just controls; Canada hedged somewhat on the issue, but the Minister of the Environment finally called for reductions (although it was not clear that there was Cabinet support for her position); and the U.S. has consistently rejected mandatory emission reductions.7
* The author thanks the Social Science and Humanities Research Council for a grant that funded this research at the University of Toronto.
Notes: 1. S. Ungar, "Social Scares and Global Warming: Beyond the Rio Convention," Society and Natural Resources, 1995, 8: 443-456.
2. S. Hilgartner and C. Bosk, "The Rise and fall of Social Problems: A Public Arenas Model," American Journal of Sociology, 1988, 94: 53-78.
3. See, for example, W. Stevens, "Violent Weather Battering Globe in Last Two Years Baffles Experts." New York Times, May 24, 1994, A1.
4. J. Leggett, "Who Will Underwrite the hurricane," New Scientist 1993, 139: 29-33.
5. Financial Times, March 27, 1995.
6. These were, respectively, The Times of London, The Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times, The Independent, The Observer, and The European; The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The International Herald Tribune, and The Los Angeles Times; The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, The Montreal Gazette, The Ottawa Citizen, The Vancouver Sun, and La Presse.
7. M. Grubb, "Climate Change Policies in Europe: National Plans, EU Policies and the International Context," International Journal of Environment and Pollution, 1995, 5: 64-79.
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