Abstract
This article examines the framing of environmental risks and natural disasters in factual entertainment television programs of the early 2000s, a hybrid form combining techniques from documentary with techniques such as dramatic reconstructions and computer-generated imagery from entertainment genres. Using qualitative frame analysis, it examines a range of factual entertainment television programs' framing of environmental risk and natural disasters in terms of their attitudes, representation of human participants and visual composition. The article considers the similarities and differences in the framing of natural disasters as factual entertainment compared to the framing of natural disasters in news, documentary and fiction film. It argues that such programs offer representational frames both consonant with and distinct from other media and concludes that they problematically offer a predominantly fatalistic response to environmental risk, constructing natural disasters as voyeuristic spectacles for vicarious entertainment.
Highlights
In an era of global warming, climate change, and the “risk society” (Beck, 1992), environmental risks have risen up public agendas over the last few decades
A central concern of research focused on natural disasters has been “whether the media are effective in increasing preparedness and response to natural hazards, or if they present a distorted portrayal of the disaster situation” (Perez-Lugo, 2004, p. 211)
Looking across the cultural and generic representational traditions in the depictions of environmental risk and natural disasters, as indicated in the introduction, provides a clear set of potential frame devices that might be utilised by factual entertainment television programmes, ranging from long standing perceptual responses to “Nature” and the “Environment” to particular representational traditions in news, fiction films, and documentary
Summary
In an era of global warming, climate change, and the “risk society” (Beck, 1992), environmental risks have risen up public agendas over the last few decades. The representation of environmental risk and natural disasters in entertainment genres, factual entertainment television programs, has been less extensively studied than representations in the news media
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