Environmental sustainability as challenge for media and journalism

Abstract

Ecology and sustainability became important issues in the mass media and the public sphere, but environmental and risk communication remain a fragmented and still somewhat marginal topic in communication research. In the first theoretical part of this contribution, relevant research questions and important underlying theoretical perspectives like news values, issue attention cycles, media framing or bias and various media effects approaches like agenda-setting, knowledge gaps and cultivation processes are discussed, whereas empirical data are presented from a study, analyzing press coverage of sustainability in Switzerland on the basis of a standardized quantitative content analysis. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010.