Environmental Concerns and the Media

Abstract

Several leaders quoted in Chap. 2 lamented that the environmental movement had not performed well on the issue of climate change. To test this, we compare the news representation of environmental issues and EMOs in Australian federal elections from 1990 to 2013. We are interested in whether that coverage has changed over time. We then focus in depth on the intensity and range of coverage of EMOs and environmental issues during the 2013 election campaign, particularly in relation to behind-the-scenes media practices of EMOs and their leaders, including the circulation of media releases and other campaign material, and levels of activity on social media and organisation websites. We find that this activity did not translate into high visibility in news media for EMOs and their leaders. We also offer tentative evidence of a link between the dominance of climate-change coverage and the poor visibility of EMOs and other environmental issues in metropolitan media.