Abstract
This article is based upon a month-long survey of the reportage of New Zealand environmental news in the country's metropolitan daily and Sunday newspapers. The study examines topics such as the coverage of different environmental issues, the frequency and distribution of different types of sources accessed for the news stories, the distribution of environmental news across different sections of the newspapers, and the ratio of news stories to opinion articles. The article concludes that ‘the environment’ is often interpreted through an economic and business framework in newspaper reportage. This is reflected in the prominence of particular kinds of environmental issues in the survey, such as climate change and electricity/energy production and consumption, and the dominance of bureaucratic and corporate/industry group sources in environmental news. The increasingly problematic nature of ‘the environment’, and the growing importance of the impact of environmental change on economic life, particularly in a national economy that remains heavily reliant on agriculture, is evident in a high proportion of ‘op-ed’ articles in the survey and a high proportion of environmental news stories in the business sections of the newspapers.
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