Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

5-1992

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Political Science

Major Professor

Michael R. Fitzgerald

Committee Members

E. William Colglazier, William Lyons, Amy Synder McCabe, John M. Scheb

Abstract

As the network news is the primary source of information about issues and events for most citizens, it acts to actively engage citizens in public discourse about public policy issues with government officials; also, by providing citizens with information, the network news functions to promote a central tenet of democratic governance: keeping the public informed. Subsequently, the network news is afforded tremendous influence in the interpretation of information that citizens receive, which allows it extraordinary opportunity to provide citizens explanations and definitions of issues and events as they transpire. The network news provides citizens with information that cultivates mass images of issues and events and influences citizens' judgments and subsequently affects how they perceive their world. This capacity of the network news to influence citizens is especially crucial for environmental problems as most citizens are unlikely to possess prior knowledge or experience with such problems, lending considerable import to the networks news' role in disseminating information to the public. To ascertain the ability of the network news to affect citizens' opinions and influence their formation of mass images about environmental waste problems, a content and visual analysis of the three major network evening news programs (ABC, CBS, NBC) is conducted for sixteen years, commencing with 1975. A model depicting the communication of information from reality to image is theorized and tested using data gathered from the content and visual analysis. Various characteristics of news coverage are analyzed to discern how the coverage provided second generation environmental problems over time conform to the proposed theoretical framework. An examination of the findings from the analysis of content reveals that an increased volume, complexity, and prominence of coverage occurs over time, yielding definite patterns and trends in coverage characteristics of environmental waste issues. The visual analysis demonstrates that distinct images of environmental waste problems are offered by each network through dramatic content, message, and the changes in the uses of appearances, sources, and references during news portrayals. Consequently, a definite image of second generation environmental waste problems emerges overtime: environmental waste is portrayed as an ominous, mysterious problem of prevalent proportions that poses a potential menace to all citizens and must, in addition to government action, be managed with assistance from other sources, perhaps science and technology or industry.

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