Media coverage of sustainable development issues – attention cycles or punctuated equilibrium?

Over the last two decades there has been a marked change in the way that the public perceives environmental issues and the concepts associated with sustainable development. Few would argue that this has moved into the mainstream of public consciousness. Coverage of sustainability related concepts within the media, as illustrated by a sample of 112 worldwide newspapers, shows a clear upward trajectory. Taking the example of climate change and sustainable development, this paper explores this increasing coverage, and arguably awareness, of sustainability concepts, and considers parallels with the concepts of punctuated equilibrium and issue-attention cycles.

[1]  Nuno Quental,et al.  Sustainable development policy: goals, targets and political cycles , 2011 .

[2]  Bryan D. Jones,et al.  Agenda Dynamics and Policy Subsystems , 1991, The Journal of Politics.

[3]  Marianne Ryghaug.  Obstacles to sustainable development: the destabilization of climate change knowledge , 2011 .

[4]  S. Gould,et al.  Punctuated equilibria: the tempo and mode of evolution reconsidered , 1977, Paleobiology.

[5]  Padhraic Smyth,et al.  From Data Mining to Knowledge Discovery in Databases , 1996, AI Mag..

[6]  D. Tilbury.  Environmental Education for Sustainability: defining the new focus of environmental education in the 1990s , 1995 .

[7]  Padhraic Smyth,et al.  From Data Mining to Knowledge Discovery: An Overview , 1996, Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.

[8]  Michael Howlett.  Issue-Attention and Punctuated Equilibria Models Reconsidered: An Empirical Examination of the Dynamics of Agenda-Setting in Canada , 1997, Canadian Journal of Political Science.

[9]  James R. Beniger,et al.  Media Content as Social Indicators , 1978 .

[10]  Itzhak Yanovitzky,et al.  Effects of News Coverage on Policy Attention and Actions , 2002, Commun. Res..

[11]  Ronen Feldman,et al.  The Text Mining Handbook: Index , 2006 .

[12]  William J. Gonzenbach.  A TIME-SERIES ANALYSIS OF THE DRUG ISSUE, 1985–1990: THE PRESS, THE PRESIDENT AND PUBLIC OPINIO , 1992 .

[13]  C. Sparks.  The readership of the British quality press , 1987 .

[14]  D. Brossard,et al.  Are Issue-Cycles Culturally Constructed? A Comparison of French and American Coverage of Global Climate Change , 2004 .

[15]  W. Russell Neuman,et al.  THE THRESHOLD OF PUBLIC ATTENTION , 1990 .

[16]  Frank Figge,et al.  What the Papers Say: Trends in Sustainability: A Comparative Analysis of 115 Leading National Newspapers Worldwide , 2009 .

[17]  D. Turnock.  Environmental problems and policies in East Central Europe: A changing agenda , 2001 .

[18]  Ah-Hwee Tan,et al.  Text Mining: The state of the art and the challenges , 2000 .

[19]  Joe Smith,et al.  The daily globe : environmental change, the public and the media , 2000 .

[20]  Stephen Morse,et al.  Post‐sustainable development , 2008 .

[21]  R. Repetto,et al.  Punctuated Equilibrium and the Dynamics of U.S. Environmental Policy , 2006 .

[22]  A. Downs.  Up and Down with Ecology--The Issue Attention Cycle , 1972 .

[23]  P. Norris.  Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide , 2001 .

[24]  M. Benton,et al.  The Agenda Setting Function of the Mass Media At Three Levels of "Information Holding" , 1976 .

[25]  John Urry,et al.  Mediating global citizenship. , 2000 .

[26]  M. Boykoff.  Flogging a dead norm? Newspaper coverage of anthropogenic climate change in the United States and United Kingdom from 2003 to 2006 , 2007 .

[27]  Media Representations of “Sustainable Development” , 2000 .

[28]  G. Utter,et al.  Saying “Yes,”“No,” and “Load Me Up” to Guns in America , 2002 .

[29]  Patrick Bijsmans,et al.  ‘Bridging the Gap’ between EU Politics and Citizens? The European Commission, National Media and EU Affairs in the Public Sphere , 2007 .

[30]  B. Jones,et al.  Agendas and instability in American politics , 1993 .

[31]  J. Shanahan,et al.  Telling Stories About Global Climate Change , 1999 .

[32]  M. Tushman,et al.  Organizational Transformation as Punctuated Equilibrium: An Empirical Test , 1994 .

[33]  Spiro K. Kiousis,et al.  Explicating Media Salience: A Factor Analysis of New York Times Issue Coverage During the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election , 2004 .

[34]  John Thøgersen,et al.  Media attention and the market for 'green' consumer products , 2006 .

[35]  A. Wollin.  Punctuated equilibrium: reconciling theory of revolutionary and incremental change , 1999 .

[36]  A. Carvalho.  Representing the politics of the greenhouse effect: , 2005 .

[37]  Jacob Cohen.  Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences , 1969, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Research Design.

[38]  J. Dearing.  Setting the polling agenda for the issue of AIDS. , 1989, Public opinion quarterly.

[39]  G. Ray Funkhouser,et al.  THE ISSUES OF THE SIXTIES: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY IN THE DYNAMICS OF PUBLIC OPINION , 1973 .

[40]  M. Givel.  Punctuated Equilibrium in Limbo: The Tobacco Lobby and U.S. State Policymaking from 1990 to 2003 , 2006 .

[41]  S. Ungar.  THE RISE AND (RELATIVE) DECLINE OF GLOBAL WARMING AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM , 1992 .

[42]  J. Burgess,et al.  Cultural Circuits of Climate Change in U.K. Broadsheet Newspapers, 1985–2003 , 2005, Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis.

[43]  B. Lichtenstein,et al.  EVOLUTION OR TRANSFORMATION: A CRITIQUE AND ALTERNATIVE TO PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM. , 1995 .

[44]  Frank W. Geels,et al.  Niches in evolutionary theories of technical change , 2007 .

[45]  Craig W. Trumbo,et al.  Constructing climate change: claims and frames in US news coverage of an environmental issue , 1996 .

[46]  S. Gould,et al.  Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism , 1972 .

[47]  A. Mazur,et al.  Sounding the Global Alarm: Environmental Issues in the US National News , 1993 .

[48]  B. Tabachnick,et al.  Using Multivariate Statistics , 1983 .

[49]  Matthew C. Nisbet,et al.  Attention Cycles and Frames in the Plant Biotechnology Debate , 2006 .

[50]  G. Ray Funkhouser,et al.  Trends in Media Coverage of the Issues of the ′60s , 1973 .

[51]  Punctuated equilibrium and the evolution of the product , 1995 .

[52]  Marti A. Hearst.  Untangling Text Data Mining , 1999, ACL.