How the News Media Cover Environmental Issues in United Kingdom: A Comprehensive Study of Mexico Gulf Oil Spill Disaster in 2010

摘要

It is widely known that an increasing number of attentions have paid on environmental issues and meanwhile,the mass media promotes its role in helping define the concept and field of environment and also bringing environmental issues into social attention.This paper intends to investigate how news media in covering environmental issues in United Kingdom through the perspective of Mexico Gulf oil spill incident in 2010 particularly.In details,this study focuses more on the study of trends and patterns of news coverage on oil spill disaster during the research process.The sample is made up of two mainstream newspapers in UK(the Times and the Guardian)which are selected based on circulation figures and politically centre-based figures from April 2010 to April 2011.This study employs content analysis as its primary methodology to observe the trends and patterns of news coverage.In addition,this study not only discovers characteristics,trends and patterns of each newspaper but also uses comparative way to discover differences and similarities in order to investigate how national newspapers differ from each other when focusing on the same environmental news.Through the investigation step by step,this study answers the hypothesis and concludes that news media cover environmental issues in a particular ways as they adopt different trends and patterns in coverage while they still have some ways in common.