Abstract
Sustainability has moved from fringe topic to headline news and key policy discourse. Yet, the vast majority of previous studies have focused on media attention to climate change, whereas other sustainability challenges have received little attention in the academic literature. Findings that have been generated in the context of climate change may or may not hold for other sustainability-related issues. In this paper, we explore trends and patterns in media coverage across a set of ten sustainability challenges. We are interested in the extent to which the recent trends and patterns in coverage that have been well-documented for climate change are reflected by other sustainability challenges. We utilise a sample of 28 broadsheet newspapers from six different countries, covering the years 2000 to 2011. Using the agenda-setting literature as a starting-point for our enquiry, we then turn to the toolset provided by financial econometrics to develop a basic typology of media attention focusing on the two dimensions information/noise and seasonality/non-seasonality. Our results show markedly different coverage profiles for these challenges. Biodiversity and cleaner technologies reflect the upward trajectory of climate change-related coverage, whereas socioeconomic sustainability challenges show stable or even declining coverage over time with clear seasonal cycles in coverage.
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