ENVIRONMENTAL JOURNALISM IN BANGLADESH

Abstract

Environmental journalism challenges conventional notions in journalism, such as journalists’ status as remote and neutral observers. Many environmental journalists even argue for a new position as active participants in various debates about meaning making. This position is explored in this study using Vincent Mosco's notion of “active social agency” for communication workers. By using such active agency, journalists engage in negotiations with other institutional agents in society over the meaning conveyed in news reporting about important environmental issues. This paper examines two weeks’ news coverage of a media campaign in Bangladesh in June 2009; the campaign aimed to save ailing rivers around the city of Dhaka. By studying empirically which topics achieve news attention and which sources attain visibility or suffer exclusion from news content, this paper demonstrates that approaches to environmental reporting do embrace some elements of active participation in debates compared to more conventional notions of journalistic neutrality and distance. The paper also argues that the nature of environmental news reporting in Bangladesh is mainly “episodic”, which is consistent with other countries, while elements of long-term “thematic” news coverage of such issues is only slightly evident.