Anders Hansen

Communication, media and environment: Towards reconnecting research on the production, content and social implications of environmental communication

Surveying environmental communication research of the past four decades, the article delineates some of the key trends and approaches in research which has sought to address the role played by media and communication processes in the public and political definition, elaboration and contestation of environmental issues and problems. It is argued: (1) that there is a need to reconnect the traditional, but traditionally also relative distinct, three major foci of communication research on media and environmental issues: the production/construction of media messages and public communications; the content/messages of media communication; and the impact of media and public communication on public/political understanding and action with regard to the environment; and (2) that there is a need for media and communications research on environmental issues/controversy to reconnect with traditional sociological concerns about power and inequality in the public sphere, particularly in terms of showing how economic, political and cultural power significantly affects the ability to participate in and influence the nature of public ‘mediated’ communication about the environment.

Researching Visual Environmental Communication

In 2008, we published a journal paper arguing that while scholarly work on media representations of environmental issues had made substantial progress in textual analysis, there had been much less work on visual representations. This special edition has a number of aims in this respect. It seeks to mark out where there has been progress since 2008, and the papers in this collection represent some of the fresh and exciting high quality scholarly work now emerging on an expanding number of topics and using different methods. We argue that we need to think more openly about what we mean by “the visual.” We begin by placing research into visual representations of the environment into the wider trajectory of visual studies research. We then proceed to review key trends in visual environmental communication research and to delineate core dimensions, contexts and sites of visual analysis.

Science Coverage in the British Mass Media: Media Output and Source Input

This paper presents a systematic content analysis of science coverage in the British press and broadcast media, and it discusses some of the source-communicator relationships which help set the agenda for science coverage. The study finds a remarkable uniformity across the media of newspapers, radio, and television in the relative prominence given to different types of science. Explanations for this are sought in the role of scientists and their institutions in either initiating or responding to media interest. The findings point to the agenda for science coverage being driven primarily by events; news values, and media practices originating outside the scientific community

Alcohol advertising and young people's drinking

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate relationships between reported alcohol consumption and exposure to alcohol advertising.Design/methodology/approach – A survey of young people (17‐21 years) was carried out in which they were questioned about their alcohol consumption habits, types of alcohol they consume, exposure to alcohol advertising, and a range of other factors linked to drinking (e.g. parental and peer groups alcohol‐related behavior and attitudes). General alcohol consumption was measured within three time‐frames: own lifetime, past year and past month.Findings – The results showed no significant relationships between exposure to any type of alcohol advertising (cinema, magazine, TV) and general alcohol consumption. Exposure to televised advertising for alcopops and for cider in each case emerged as a significant predictor of consumption of each of those types of alcohol. While there was no evidence that alcohol advertising plays a significant role in shaping general alcohol consumption amon...

The portrayal of alcohol on television

THIS paper presents the results of a systematic con tent analysis of the portrayal of alcohol in two weeks of prime time television programmes. The analysis takes its point of departure in the argument that, in order to begin to understand the possible contri bution of television to alcohol-related beliefs and practices, it is necessary to look beyond the tra ditional research focus on persuasive communi cation, and examine the images of alcohol in television programmes generally. The analysis shows that alcohol images are prominent, particu larly in fictional programmes. Alcohol consumption is associated with pleasant sociable behaviour and with glamorous and affluent life-styles. There is little portrayal of the potentially negative effects and con sequences of drinking. Directions for further research are suggested.

Promising Directions for Environmental Communication Research

Despite the unfortunate historical connotations with linear models of communication, I find the traditional three-way division of core foci for communication research— production, content, and audiences—helpful for identifying and thinking about how and where we should be focusing our research efforts in order to advance our understanding of the role of communication in the politics of the environment. Perhaps one of the core problems of the vast and growing field of environmental communication research is very much the traditional and long-standing problem of much of communication research in general, namely the tendency (often for predominantly practical and pragmatic reasons) to focus on one of the three core domains with only a tacit assumption about how, e.g., the careful and systematic study of media/communications content might help in understanding the implications of such content for, e.g., public understanding or political decision-making. In a paper published in 2011 in a special double issue of the International Communication Gazette on Communicating the Environment, I argued for greater integration of our research efforts relating to the production, content, and social implications of environmental communication (Hansen, 2011). In my brief presentation today, I would like to reiterate the call for greater integration and to delineate, under each of these three domains, areas that are either ripe for development and/or where exciting developments are already taking place. These are areas that I believe can help advance environmental communication research further and which point to promising renewed roles and relevance for environmental communication research in the politics of the environment.

The changing uses of accuracy in science communication

Tracing its historical trajectories, this article explores the preoccupation with accuracy in science communication research and explores the resurgence in the present century of concerns about accuracy, balance and impartiality in public communication of science. It is argued that many of the original insights from news and journalism research are still relevant and important if re-formulated in constructionist terms about voice, access and claims-making, and asking, in whose interest? Key to this is also the recognition of a radically changing – technologically, economically and professionally – media and communications environment, with implications for science journalism and a very different dynamic regarding the range and type of actors involved in discursively constructing opinions and information about controversial science and expertise. The article concludes with proposals for future emphases and directions in research broadly concerned with accuracy in science communication.

Researching ‘teachers in the news’: the portrayal of teachers in the British national and regional press

An outline of frameworks for conceptualising and analysing news media roles in the representation of teachers, is followed by a discussion of quantitative and qualitative approaches to the study of news coverage. An argument is made for the benefit of using corpus linguistic tools within the overall conceptual focus on lexical and syntactical structures offered by critical discourse analysis. Findings are presented from a comprehensive study of the press portrayal of teachers and education. Focusing on the portrayal of teachers in news headline coverage, the study shows a considerable lexical and syntactic change between 1991 and 2005 in the public/news representation of teachers, broadly from a negative view of teachers as troublesome to a more positive emphasis on teachers as a hard-working profession besieged by mounting pressures.

Alcohol, Advertising, Media, and Consumption among Children, Teenagers, and Young Adults

While much research on the roles of mediated communication in relation to alcohol consumption, drinking practices and alcohol-related issues has traditionally focused on alcohol advertising and related types of alcohol promotion, recent decades have witnessed a growing recognition that research attention needs to be given to the wider media and symbolic environment, through which norms and values associated with the use and abuse of alcohol are communicated. We start by reviewing the growing body of research which has examined the extent, distribution across media and genres, and the content of media messages about alcohol and drinking in advertising and entertainment media content. We then proceed to review the research evidence on how young people’s learning about alcohol, beliefs about alcohol and alcohol consumption practices are informed or influenced by alcohol advertising/promotion and by the types of media representations of alcohol identified in the first part of our review. Key approaches and frameworks for analysing the role and influence of media representations of alcohol on young people’s alcohol-related beliefs and practices are examined before considering the role of communication research evidence in relation to (political) questions about the regulation/restriction of alcohol promotion and images in the media. The review demonstrates that significant progress has been made in recent decades towards mapping the contours of the mediated message environment regarding alcohol and, hence, towards identifying where potential effects or influences of media messages about alcohol may or are likely to occur. Our review of research approaches and research evidence on the impact of mediated messages about alcohol on (young) people’s beliefs, perception and behavior regarding alcohol

Communicating the environment: Guest editors' introduction

The articles gathered together in this special issue were submitted in response to a call for manuscripts, issued in 2009, on ‘Communicating the environment’. While the recent decade has seen the rise to dominance of ‘climate change’ as a focus for media, public and political environmental concern, as well as for science/social science research on the environment, the call for papers deliberately aimed more broadly at attracting contributions from the wider field of social science, media, communication and cultural studies research on environmental communication. The articles brought together here thus represent a rich and exciting range of research foci and, equally important in our view, of theoretical frameworks and research approaches to the study of environmental mediation and communication. Comprising a range of different national and media foci, they offer analyses of a diverse range of media forms including film/animation, television, promotional videos, newspapers and magazines, and with contributions by scholars from New Zealand, Canada, the US, the UK, Belgium, Denmark and Germany. The environmental issues examined range from climate change, nuclear power and agricultural biotechnology, to media portrayals of ‘nature’ and ‘environment’. Not surprisingly, given the rise of ‘framing analysis’ in the last two decades, several of the articles draw on, deploy and advance ‘framing analysis’, while often combining the insights from theories of ‘framing’ with content analysis and discourse analytical approaches. In our view, a particular strength of this special issue is