Minnesotans For Sustainability©
Sustainable Society: A society that balances the environment, other life forms, and human interactions over an indefinite time period.
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Minnesotans For Sustainability©
Sustainable Society: A society that balances the environment, other life forms, and human interactions over an indefinite time period.
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How and Why Journalists Avoid the Population – Environment Connection
T. Michael Maher March 1997
Abstract
Recent surveys show that Americans are less concerned about population than they were 25 years ago, and they aren’t connecting environmental degradation to population growth. News coverage is a significant variable affecting public opinion, and how reporters frame a problem frequently signals what is causing the problem. Using a random sample of 150 stories about urban sprawl, endangered species and water shortages, Part I of this study shows that only about one story in 10 framed population growth as a source of the problem. Further, only one story in the entire sample mentioned population stability among the realm of possible solutions. Part II presents the results of interviews with 25 journalists whose stories on local environmental problems omitted the causal role of population growth. It shows that journalists are aware of the controversial nature of the population issue, and prefer to avoid it if possible. Most interviewees said that a national phenomenon like population growth as beyond the scope of what they could write as local reporters. In 1992 the National Academy of Sciences and the British Royal Society issued a joint statement urging world leaders to brake population growth before it is too late (Royal Society, 1992). That same year, 1,600 scientists (including 99 Nobel laureates) issued a statement warning all humanity that it must soon stabilize population and halt environmental destruction (Detjen, 1992). That same year, a Gallup poll showed that Americans were less concerned about population than they had been 20 years before (Newport & Saad, 1992). That same year, world leaders ignored population growth at the largest environmental summit in history, the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro. Why are the American public and political leaders so indifferent about this issue that so concerns the world’s leading scientists and environmentalists? Not because Americans are anti-environment: Another recent Gallup Poll (Hueber, 1991), showed that 78 percent of Americans considered themselves environmentalists and 71 percent favored strong environmental protection, even at the expense of economic growth. How can Americans express strong concern about the environment, yet a diminishing concern about population growth, which many environmental experts consider the ultimate environmental problem? It seems likely that Americans are not connecting population growth to environmental problems. In addition to the above-cited Gallup poll, a series of nationwide focus groups conducted for the Pew Global Stewardship Initiative confirmed this. The study sought to determine attitudes on population among 10 different voting groups, among them Catholic Anglos, mainstream Protestants, Jewish groups, and environmentalists. The focus group summary report noted, "The issue of population is not invisible but most often it is a weak blip on the radar screens for most of the voting groups —with the exception of the committed environmentalists and internationalists" (Pew, 1993, p. 22). Focus groups are ideal for getting beneath the surface of public opinion, for finding out why people think what they think. And most tellingly, when the Pew-sponsored focus groups were evaluated on whether respondents could connect population growth with environmental degradation, environmentalists and some of the internationalists and Jewish men's groups could make the connection, "but overall most of the others do not make any direct, unaided connections between population and environment;" the 1993 Pew report stated (p. 26, italics in the original report). But why is the American public not making the connection? This paper explores the possibility that news stories, from which Americans may infer causality of environmental problems, may keep them from making the connection between population growth and the problems it causes. Population researchers Paul and Anne Ehrlich opened their book, The Population Explosion, with a chapter titled, "Why Isn't Everyone as Scared as We Are?" They acknowledged, "The average person, even the average scientist, seldom makes the connection between [disparate environmental problems] and the population problem, and thus remains unworried" (1990, p. 21). But while they noted that the evening news almost never connects population growth to environmental problems, the Ehrlichs chiefly blamed social taboos fostered by the Catholic Church and "a colossal failure of education" (p. 32) for public indifference about population. Howell (1992) also minimized the role of the media in influencing public aptitude about science and the environment, and pointed instead to education:
The Ehrlichs and Howell seem to assume that education is the chief factor driving public opinion about environmental causality. But in Tradeoffs: Imperatives of Choice in a High-Tech World, Wenk (1986) offered a more media-centric view of how the public learns: "Whatever literacy in science and technology the general public has reached is not from formal education. Rather, it is from the mass media. That responsibility of the press has been almost completely ignored" (p. 162). This study will examine press responsibility for the public's indifference to population growth by exploring two questions:
Before discussing method and findings, however, we must first review the theoretical basis for the media's role in molding public opinion.
Wenk's point that the media are prime movers of public opinion aligns well with recent mass communication scholarship. Scholarly estimation of the power of the media has fluctuated widely during the twentieth century. In the early decades, the mass media seemed to wield great power, as evidenced by the success of the Creel Committee in selling billions in war bonds during World War I, and by the nationwide panic Orson Welles created in his 1938 Halloween hoax broadcast of invasion from Mars. But scholarly estimation of media influence plummeted when The People's Choice study showed media stories had little influence on a panel of voters during the 1940 presidential election (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1968), and when experiments showed that motivational films had little effect in changing soldiers' attitudes in preparation for fighting World War II (Hovland, Lumsdaine, & Sheffield, 1965). The scholarly stock exchange remained bearish on media influence until 1972, when McCombs and Shaw published the first quantitative agenda-setting study. They showed very high correlations between those issues that received the most media coverage over time, and those issues that a sample of the public identified as most important. Since then more than 200 agenda-setting studies have been published (Rogers, Dearing & Bregman, 1993). These studies have generally affirmed Cohen's oft-quoted dictum that the media may not tell the public what to think, but they are spectacularly successful in telling the public what to think about (1963). Recent scholarship has added a corollary to Cohen: media messages may also succeed in telling the public how to think about an issue (McCombs & Shaw, 1993). The study of media framing suggests that reality is practically infinite, and that in reducing reality into a story a reporter must select some facts and ignore others. Further, the reporter must make some facts more salient than others in the story by giving them more space or by offering them early in the story. Unlike agenda-setting, which captures only the transfer of issue salience from the news media to the public, media framing theory provides a means of examining how news stories portray the causes of a given public issue. Recent scholarship (Entman, 1993; Pan & Kosicki, 1993; Edelman, 1993) has linked framing with causal reasoning, and Iyengar's studies (1989; 1991) have similarly dealt with news framing and public perception of responsibility for social problems. Rephrased within a media-framing perspective, this paper seeks to determine how and why reporters diverge from experts in framing causality for environmental problems. But we should establish experts' consensus that population matters in environmental issues.
A recent EPA publication lamented, "At present, there is a deplorable lack of research that assesses the impacts of demographic change within the U.S. on environmental problems at all levels" (Orians & Skumanich, 1995, p. 67). Nevertheless, many scholars have implicated population growth when they discuss base-level causality for environmental problems. Ward and Dubos (1972), Ehrlich and Ehrlich (1990), Commoner (1990) and Harrison (1992) argued that environmental impact results from three primary determinants: population, consumption level (sometimes expressed as economic level or affluence) and technology (or resources). This is usually expressed as a formula I=PAT; that is, environmental impact is the product of population, affluence and technology factors. Bailey (1990) reported additional models, POET and PISTOL, which add social organization, information and standard of living to the basic I=PAT model. With specific reference to habitat loss, Sears (1956), Jackson (1981), Myers (1991), Ehrlich and Ehrlich (1990), Harrison (1992) and many others have shown that population growth pushes people into relatively pristine, natural environments. Endangered species problems are frequently the flip side of this coin: when people convert wildlife habitat to their own habitat, they bulldoze trees, introduce chemicals, channelize streams, build dams, alter the water table, and disrupt habitat in numerous other ways. While it is well known that environmental experts connect environmental degradation to population growth, it is less well known that land developers are equally straightforward in implicating population growth as a causal agent for turning wildlife habitat and farmland into subdivisions. The how-to manuals for real estate development are very explicit about the critical role of population growth: of existing facilities ... Growth in population creates a need not only for housing but also for supporting real estate facilities such as shopping centers, service stations, medical clinics, school, office buildings, and so on (Goodkin, 1974, p. 14). The main idea to keep in mind as you search for rewarding corporate realty investments is that in general land prices are the resultants of population. As more people come on a given section of land, whether to build homes, to work in stores, office buildings, factories, financial institutions, or supermarkets, they create a demand for living space, land and structures. This demand, except during a recession, seems likely to expand indefinitely (Cobleigh, 1971, p. 10). Demand for real estate at the national level is influenced by national population growth and demographic change, coupled with expanding employment opportunities and rising per capita incomes (McMahan, 1976, p. 76).
We should acknowledge that the cornucopian economists (for example, Simon, 1981; 1990; Bailey, 1993) dispute the notion that population growth has produced any adverse environmental effects. However, their arguments have had much greater predictive power with regard to the short-term price and availability of nonrenewable resources. The cornucopians have failed to explain away the continuing net loss of wildlife habitat, and the growing incidence of water shortages and declining water quality. In general, there is good consensus among the experts that population growth is a significant variable that affects land and water use. But do media reports reflect this? This is a two-part study. Part I uses content analysis to determine the extent to which reporters include the causal role of population growth in framing stories about the environment. Part II is a follow-up to Part I. It employs depth interviews to discover why reporters ignore the connection between population growth and environmental problems. Since Part I provides the premise for Part II, its methods and results will be discussed separately.
To measure media framing of environmental stories, Part I uses a randomized sample of 50 articles each for three common population-influenced environmental problems: endangered species, urban sprawl, and water shortages. Articles were downloaded from Lexis-Nexis, the world's largest database of full-text news stories. At the time of the study the Nexis library included 170 newspapers, 330 magazines, as well as wire services. Within Nexis, the CURRNT file limited the search to stories dated 1991 or later. Using the connector "w/2" (e.g., "endangered w/2 species") produced only stories in which the search terms appeared within two words of each other.The search produced 1,349 water shortage stories, 1,942 urban sprawl stories, and 6,001 endangered species stories. These were sampled by using a random number table. Selected stories were limited to newspaper, magazine and wire stories from U.S. and Canadian sources. To be considered for coding, the story had to describe a population-driven environmental conflict. (It is now common for various grievance groups to call themselves an endangered species. Such stories were discarded.)All stories were coded whether or not population growth was mentioned as a cause of the problem described in the story. A second coder read 30% of the stories from each of the three issues as a reliability check. Coder reliability was 100% because coding news stories for the presence or absence of a reference to population growth is much more reliable than coding stories into abstract, overlapping content categories.Of the 150-article sample, 16 (less than 11%) mentioned population growth as a cause of the environmental problem described in the story. Population growth appeared in eight urban sprawl stories, seven water shortage stories, and one story on endangered species. Results are presented in Tables, 1, 2, and 3.Tables 1,2, and 3 also list solutions mentioned in each story. These solutions are numerically summarized in Table 4. As noted earlier, many experts agree that environmental impact is a product of three primary determinants: population, affluence and technology. If these factors serve as causes, addressing them could serve as solutions. Table 4 analyzes how solutions are framed within the sample of stories.Tables 1-3 show that population growth is mentioned as a cause in only 10.7% of environmental - problem stories. But population is even more unpopular as an environmental solution: Table 4 shows that from a sample of 150, only one story mentions that a stable population might be a possible solution to environmental problems.Table 4 suggests that reducing consumption is the favored remedy in stories about endangered species and urban sprawl; but for water shortage problems, technological remedies are higher on the media agenda. In other words, most endangered-species preservation measures entail forbidding consumption of some rare creature's habitat (e.g., ancient forests or springs or desert lands). Likewise, many urban sprawl stories present zoning - legal measures to limit consumption of land - as the chief measure to constrain development of a city perimeter. Such a solution simply dumps the population problem on some other community. But water shortage stories present technological fixes (e.g., new dams, new wells, new pipelines, desalination of sea water) 56% more frequently than reducing consumption.
Stories that mention human population growth are listed in bold face; all others do not mention population.
Stories that mention human population growth are listed in bold face; all others do not mention population.
Table 3. Water Shortages Stories that mention human population growth are listed in bold face; all others do not mention population.
I = PAT* solutions presented in Lexis-Nexis sample of environmental coverage. Listed is the number of stories within each problem category that suggests population, consumption or technology solutions. These numbers are followed by strategies typical of each solution category.
*Environmental Impact (I) = the product of population (P), affluence or consumption level (A), and technology choices (T) [see Ehrlich & Ehrlich (1990), pp. 58-59].
Figure 1. Summary of sample of interviewed journalists
Although many scientific groups, environmental scientists and even land development experts agree that population growth is a basic cause of environmental change, media framing diverges widely from expert framing. Just over 10% of a Lexis-Nexis sample of environmental news stories links human population growth to the environmental problems it affects. Even more significantly, only one story in a sample of 150 presents the view that limiting population growth might be a solution to environmental problems. From the standpoint of Americans' environmental future, the most damaging stories might be those that mention population growth as a cause of the problem, while ignoring population stability as a solution. Such stories effectively tell the reader: population growth affects environmental degradation, but population stability is too outlandish even to be mentioned as a policy option. Ignoring that a stable population might be a long-term solution to environmental problems, news stories instead direct the public's attention to palliative solutions: build new dams to supply water, zone to prevent urban sprawl, set aside land for endangered species. Given reporters' penchant for proclaiming to "tell both sides," to render all news that's fit to print, to answer who? what? where? when? and why?, this leads naturally to the question: Why do reporters avoid the population issue so steadfastly?
As we have seen, both land development economists and environmental experts acknowledge population growth as a key source of environmental change. But journalists frame environmental causality differently. Why? Communication theory offers several possibilities. First is the hegemony-theory interpretation: reports omit any implication that population growth might produce negative effects, in order to purvey the ideology of elites who make money from population growth. As Molotch and Lester (1974) put it, media content can be viewed as reflecting "the practices of those having the power to determine the experience of others" (p. 120). Since real estate, construction and banking interests directly support the media through advert | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
