Fracking and Framing: A Comparative Analysis of Media Coverage of Hydraulic Fracturing in Canadian and US Newspapers

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a controversial but popular method of extracting oil and gas in North America. There are a myriad of completing claims about the economic benefits and the environmental costs of the technology. This paper examines news media coverage of fracking in four Canadian and four American newspapers over a five-year period. A comparison is made at the national level as well as at a paired subnational level between jurisdictions where fracking is embraced and where fracking is banned. The paper demonstrates that in both countries the main storyline is about water quality, but beyond that differences emerge as Americans focus more on wildlife and public health and Canadians focus more on moratoriums and energy independence. Moreover, while there were similarities in media coverage of fracking in pro-fracking and anti-fracking jurisdictions, there were notable differences in attention to the topics of public health and economic benefits.     

Imagining the Future at the Global and National Scale: A Comparative Study of British and Dutch Press Coverage of Rio 1992 and Rio 2012

Climate change and imagined futures are intricately linked, discussed by policy-makers and reported in the media. In this article we focus on the construction of future expectations in the press coverage of the 1992 and 2012 United Nations conferences in Rio de Janeiro in British and Dutch national newspapers. We use a novel combination of methods, semantic co-word networks and metaphor analysis, to study imagined futures. Our findings show that between 1992 and 2012 there was an overall shift from future-oriented hope to past-oriented disappointment regarding implementing international agreements on climate change policy, but with subtle and interesting differences between the UK and The Netherlands. Certain national differences seem to be stable over time and are indicative of rather dissimilar policy cultures in two nations which are geographically quite close.     

Chemical Controversy: Canadian and US News Coverage of the Scientific Debate about Bisphenol A

This study analyzes how newspapers covered the scientific controversy surrounding the health effects of exposure to Bisphenol A (BPA). Specifically, it examines whether framing, sources of scientific information, and balancing of competing sides in the debate differed across national political contexts and journalistic approaches. In regard to the former, it compares coverage in Canada (represented by the Globe and Mail), which had banned BPA in baby bottles and cups, to coverage in the United States (represented by the New York Times and Washington Post), which had not. In regard to the latter, it compares coverage in two US newspapers that took a conventional journalistic approach (the New York Times and Washington Post) to coverage in a US newspaper that launched an investigative series regarding BPA (the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel). The study concludes by considering what the findings suggest about how social forces shape coverage of scientific controversies involving environmental issues.     

Curb Your Enthusiasm: On Media Communication of Bioenergy and the Role of the News Media in Technology Diffusion

There is widespread agreement that the mitigation of climate changes requires societies across the globe to speed up the diffusion of renewable energy technologies. This article pursues an interest in the diffusion of one such technology: bioenergy. It does so through a study of how bioenergy is covered and communicated in the news media of Norway and Sweden, countries where the diffusion of this technology looks radically different. Mobilizing a domestication perspective, it finds that the news media in the two countries ascribe diverging meaning to the technology, offering audiences clearly varied images of what bioenergy “is.” In other words, the technology is domesticated in different ways, suggesting that media coverage plays a role in systems of innovation and diffusion. How this affects the public, however, is an under analyzed element in the innovation and diffusion literature, and the article calls for further investigation into this matter.     

Global Journalism in Decision-Making Moments: A Case Study of Canadian and American Television Coverage of the 2009 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen

Climate change is a phenomenon with global causes but local effects, and thus global climate change decision-making moments provide ideal opportunities to examine how local and global discourses work together—or do not—through global journalism. This case study investigates the globally focused vs. culturally bound frames used in television news coverage, in Canada and the USA, of the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Initial quantitative findings that Canadian media used many more culturally bound sources than did American media contradict the past findings and suggest Canadian media engaged less in producing global journalism than did American media. A follow-up qualitative analysis not only found more global framing in the American stories, but also concluded that global sources did not necessarily create global journalism; instead, a global orientation is required.     

Environmental Damage,Abandoned Treaties,and Fossil-Fuel Dependence: The Coming Costs of Oil-and-Gas Exploration in the “1002 Area” of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Contrary to claims from American politicians, lobbyists, and oil and gas executives, allowing energy development in the Alaskan Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) will harm the environment, compromise international law, erode the social significance of wilderness protection, and ultimately fail to␣increase the energy security of the United States. After exploring a brief history of the ANWR controversy, this piece argues that the operation of oil and gas refineries in ANWR will release discharged solids, drilling waste, and dirty diesel fuel into the ecosystem’s food-chain, as they have from oil operations in Prudhoe Bay. Less obvious but equally important, oil and gas exploration in ANWR will violate a number of international treaties on biodiversity protection. In the end, development in ANWR will threaten the concept of wilderness protection, and will do little to end US dependence on foreign sources of energy. About the Author: Benjamin K. Sovacool is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University in Blacksburg, Virginia. He works as a research analyst for the Consortium on Energy Restructuring and is a Senior Research Fellow for the Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Research. He also just completed a Graduate Fellowship in Energy Policy at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Readers should send their comments on this paper to: BhaskarNath@aol.com within 3 months of publication of this issue.