Media routines and the making of environmental news: The public relations approach
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37535/105005220262Keywords:
Media power, environmental communication, framing, news values, public relationsAbstract
The environment has become a global concern in the last few decades. This is because environmental issues and crises, largely caused by various human activities, with their attendant consequences, have continued to generate unwholesome challenges of our time. Many environmental issues have been at the front burner of global discourse. These include pollution, land degradation, climate change, population explosion, ecological depletion, generating sustainable waste, and waste management. Meanwhile, the process through which some issues become dominant while others fall out of visibility is connected to how public issues are defined through the power of the media. While acknowledging the pivotal role of the mass media as a primary conduit for environmental communication, the authors take a critical and theoretical approach to examine the influence of media power on the portrayal and perception of environmental issues. The study delves deeper into the often-overlooked influence of Public Relations (PR) strategies on media coverage and public discourse. The scholarly synthesis demonstrates that PR practitioners are not merely sources of environmental stories but act as agenda builders whose strategic engagement with media organisations, particularly through information subsidies, influences the visibility and interpretation of environmental issues. These engagements intersect with journalistic routines and news values to shape which issues become salient and how they are interpreted. The paper’s integration of PR perspectives with agenda-setting and framing approaches, advances a more robust understanding of environmental news production as a negotiated process between journalists and strategic communicators.
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