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Reality effect or media effect? Television's moulding of the environmental sanitation agenda in Ghana
Abstract
Mass media have a responsibility to popularise social and developmental issues. This is a central thesis of the normative view of mass media and development. Given the precarious nature of environmental sanitation in the West African country, Ghana, what is the nature of media coverage of environmental sanitation? And how does media coverage relate to people's perceptions of and attitudes toward the problem? While it may be counterintuitive for people to rely on media as sources of information on an obtrusive problem such as environmental sanitation, using content/frame analysis and a survey, this article suggests the potential of mass media (television news) in Ghana to project particular worldviews relating to issues that audiences encounter in their daily lives - a mechanism this article refers to as agenda moulding. Thus, even for obtrusive social and development issues such as environmental sanitation, the nature and level of media coverage matters.
... Additionally, some studies in Ghana have looked at media framing of environmental issues more broadly, not focusing on air pollution (see [29,30,40]). It is evident from the above overview that not much scholarly attention has been devoted to studies on newspaper coverage of air pollution in Africa. ...
Mass media plays an increasingly persuasive role in orienting political decisions, shaping social agendas, influencing individuals’ actions, and interpreting scientific evidence for the public. With growing scientific understanding of the health, social and environmental consequences of air pollution, there is an urgent need to understand how media coverage frames these links, particularly in Low- and Middle-Income Countries. This paper examines how the Ghanaian print and electronic media houses are covering air pollution issues given increased efforts at reducing air pollution within the country. The main goal of this work is to track the progress of policies to reduce air pollution. We used a qualitative content analysis of selected newspapers (both traditional and online) between the periods 2016 and 2021 and we found that articles on air pollution have been increasing, with more reportage on impact and policy issues compared to causes of air pollution. A focus group with six members of the media confirmed an interest in covering health and environmental issues, particularly coverage of specific diseases and human-interest pieces. This increasing attention is likely associated with intensifying local, national, and international action to improve air quality in Ghana, and growing awareness of the health impacts of air pollution.
This systematic review interrogates the present state of framing research in Ghana. The purpose is to synthesise the existing literature on media framing in the Ghanaian context and to detect the gaps that needs to be filled. A qualitative content analysis of seventeen open-access journal articles retrieved from five databases (International Knowledge Sharing Platform, Taylor and Francis Online, Semantic Scholar, Research Gate, Sage Publications) is conducted to examine the issues discussed in the articles, the mass media type analysed and the research methods used in addressing the issues in the articles. The articles identified were published between 2013 and 2022. Content analysed data were thematically discussed to answer the research questions. The study revealed that research on media framing in Ghana centred on health and sexuality, politics and elections, environmental issues and others. The review further identified fifteen empirical studies out of the seventeen articles retrieved. Researchers also focused more on exploratory (qualitative) than explanatory (quantitative) research methods. In addition, most of the identified studies were skewed more toward print media and online media (traditional media websites) than broadcast media and other forms of online media, such as blogs. This review paper is the first of its kind; hence, will provide significant knowledge on media framing in the Ghanaian context to future researchers. It will also set the premise for other reviews to be conducted on various aspects of the concept in the Ghanaian context.
In Ghana, the year 2018 saw many news articles about the youth, market women, and students increasingly abusing two opioids: tramadol and codeine-containing cough syrups. Our study examines Ghanaian news media framing of the opioid abuse crisis in Ghana to determine if and how the amount and framing of media coverage may have helped push the issue onto the policy agenda. We content analyzed all available online versions of print media coverage of news stories about tramadol and or codeine coverage in Ghana. Findings revealed the predominant and consistent use of the policy frame, societal attribution of responsibility, reliance on expert sources, and the inclusion of mobilizing information. We argue that the news media’s talk about the health crisis as a policy issue might not only offer specific solutions, but also perform an advocacy function by mobilizing various stakeholders as conversation partners to act.
Traditional agenda-setting research has convincingly demonstrated that the media's agenda influences the public's agenda in a somewhat linear fashion. Following from that, agenda-setting researchers are now investigating the attributes of culturally specific agendas. Their studies provide insight into what appears to be a complex process that may be affected by factors beyond those already documented. This paper similarly examines the intricate connections between media, specific events, and agenda-setting in Ghana. In this context it considers two specific events with significant sociocultural implications-events that were framed by the media to produce agenda-setting effects. The paper argues that the media's framing of those events provided their audience with certain ready-made patterns of cognition, thereby enhancing the possibility of agenda-setting. Résumé : La recherche traditionnelle sur la fonction d'agenda (« agenda setting ») a démontré de manière convaincante que les priorités des médias ont une influence sur les priorités du public de manière quelque peu linéaire. Dével-oppant leur approche, les chercheurs sur la fonction d'agenda sont en train d'étudier celle-ci par rapport à son impact culturel. Leurs études révèlent ce qui paraît être un processus complexe que peuvent influencer des facteurs peu documentés à ce jour. À l'instar de cette approche culturelle, cet article examine les rapports complexes entre la fonction d'agenda, les médias et des événements particuliers au Ghana. Dans ce contexte, il considère deux événements spécifiques dont les conséquences socioculturelles ont été significatives-des événements présentés par les médias de manière à produire des effets de type « fonction d'agenda ». Cet article soutient que la manière de présenter ces événements, étant congruente avec les manières de percevoir du public, augmente la possibilité que la fonction d'agenda produise un effet dans ces cas-ci.
The increasing popularity of the framing concept in media analysis goes hand in hand with significant inconsistency in its application. This paper outlines an integrated process model of framing that includes production, content, and media use perspectives. A typology of generic and issue-specific frames is proposed based on previous studies of media frames. An example is given of how generic news frames may be identified and used to understand cross-national differences in news coverage. The paper concludes with an identification of contentious issues in current framing research.
This article documents three types of media effects that operated on public opinion during the Persian Gulf crisis and war. First, the level of network news coverage matched the proportion of Gallup poll respondents naming the Gulf crisis as the nation's most important problem (agenda-setting). Second, use of data from the 1988, 1990, and 1991 National Election Studies (NES) shows that the weight respondents accorded foreign policy performance when evaluating George Bush significantly increased (priming) in the aftermath of the Gulf crisis. Third, content data (showing that network news coverage was preoccupied with military affairs and highly event oriented) and survey data are coupled to show that respondents reporting higher rates of exposure to television news expressed greater support for a military as opposed to a diplomatic response to the crisis (framing). In conclusion, it is suggested that these effects, in combination with the nature of the media's information sources, were conducive to legitimizing the administration's perspective on the crisis.
This study examined the agenda-setting process and the role it may play on the Internet, specifically in electronic bulletin boards (EBB). Online media coverage of four issues from five news media were downloaded during the 1996 fall political campaign. The frequency of EBB discussions of each issue served as the surrogate for the public agenda. An ARIMA model cross-correlational test showed EBB discussions of three issues—immigration, health care, and taxes—correlated with news media coverage, with time lags varying from 1 day to 7 days. Only for abortion did the media have no apparent agenda-setting effect. Media coverage apparently can provide individuals with information they can use in their EBB specific-issue discussions.
It is suggested that one of the reasons that there is such a lack of clarity as to whether the media have effects is that researchers have proceeded from the wrong theoretical conceptualizations to study the wrong questions. The dependency model of media effects is presented as a theoretical alternative in which the nature of the tripartite audience-media-society relationship is assumed to most directly determine many of the effects that the media have on people and society. The present paper focuses upon audience dependency on media information resources as a key interactive condition for alteration of audience beliefs, behavior, or feelings as a result of mass communicated in formation. Audience dependency is said to be high in societies in which the media serve many central information functions and in periods of rapid social change or pervasive social conflict. The dependency model is further elaborated and illustrated by examination of several cognitive, affective, and behavioral effects which may be readily analyzed and researched from this theoretical framework.
Agenda-setting research is vigorously pursued within the general field of communication research. Despite this, the agenda-setting model continues to be criticized on methodological grounds. Some of the criticisms arise out of the field's heavy reliance on quantitative methods. This article argues that qualitative methods can be used to counter some of these criticisms. This is done using research on media coverage of the environment in the West African country of Ghana. Environmental issues have featured prominently in research aimed at proving that the media do indeed influence the public agenda. However, even within this subarea of agenda-setting research, there is no agreement on the agenda-setting effects of the media. This study adopted qualitative methods and found that the media indeed influenced the environmental agenda of the public. The qualitative approach helped to avoid some of the criticisms levelled against traditional agenda-setting methodology.
In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom staff, and broadcasters play an important part in shaping political reality. Readers learn not only about a given issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount of information in a news story and its position. In reflecting what candidates are saying during a campaign, the mass media may well determine the important issues--that is, the media may set the "agenda." of the campaign.
Although the agenda-setting effects of the news media on people's attention to, comprehension of, and opinions about topics in the news primarily have been studied in political communication settings, the central theoretical idea — the transfer of salience from the media agenda to the public agenda — fits equally well in the world of business communication. In the case of corporate reputations, only the operational definitions of the objects and attributes on these agendas are changed here to frame five key theoretical propositions about the influence of news coverage on corporate reputations among the public. This presentation of five basic propositions about first and second-level agenda setting effects as well as intermedia agenda-setting effects offers a theoretical roadmap for systematic empirical research into the influence of the mass media on corporate reputations.
In the polluted “chemical corridor” of the Ohio River valley, respondents who most frequently read and view media reports about the environment are more likely to rate their own environmental risks as higher.
It is widely held in the social science community that the news media have little influence on public opinion. In this paper, it is argued that this counterintuitive belief is based on weak theories derived from studies with faulty methodologies. A theory of variable news media influence is presented, which states that the less obtrusive an issue is, and the less time the issue has been prominent in the media, the greater is the news media's influence on opinion about that issue. Data is presented which demonstrate that network television news has influenced national public opinion about certain issues in a pattern consistent with the theory.
Objective. This article investigates how urban environmental vulnerability to hazards reflects in the perceptions and attitudes of the public in three major cities in Israel: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa. Our central argument is that the differences between the residents' perceptions and attitudes toward environmental issues are related mostly to the actual hazard levels of their communities, whereas individual differences in socioeconomic characteristics are of lesser importance in this regard. Methods. The research was based on survey data of representative samples of the adult residents in the three cities. The differences in attitudes and perceptions among the three samples were statistically assessed by means of analysis of variance. Results. We found relatively strong and consistent relationships between actual environmental vulnerability to hazards in the three cities and their residents' attitudes toward environmental issues. The relationships with socioeconomic characteristics, such as education and income, were considerably weaker and less consistent. Conclusions. The results of this research indicate that environmental concern is not exclusive to groups and individuals characterized by postmaterialist values. Rather, the urban public in general is responsive to the environmental vulnerability of its community. This conclusion supports the argument that attitudes toward the environment are mainly affected by instrumental considerations of objective environmental problems rather than by subjective values.
This article reports the findings of the multistage agenda-setting process of four Israeli elections. In the first stage, agenda building, it is demonstrated that there is a close association between real-world indicators and media agenda. In the second stage, agenda setting, it was found that the level of television coverage of issues influences the proportion of surveys' respondents naming these issues as the nation's most important problems. In the third stage, priming, the analysis focused on electoral voting behavior in multiparty parliamentary elections rather than on the usual evaluations of the president's performance. At the individual level, there is evidence for a priming effect. At the aggregate level, the findings suggest that there may be a priming effect on the actual electoral success of various political parties.
This article is the second part of a study on environmental activism and the media in 'the network society', with the first part examining the historical evolution of this phenomenon in the Australian context. This article assesses the impact of the internet and world wide web (WWW) upon contemporary media-environmentalist relations, and the deployment of environmental activist communication strategies. Drawing upon evidence collected from in-depth interviews with environmental activists and news media journalists, the conclusions presented are two-fold. First, the internet and WWW are effective communications technologies that help to influence the reporting agenda of large-scale print and electronic news media outlets. This effectiveness has ensured that groups such as the Wilderness Society manage to announce their campaigns and messages to a wide audience through the news media both in Australia and internationally. Second, and contrary to our original hypothesis, the use of the internet and websites by environmental activists is actually conservative when viewed from the perspective of media and communication power. Rather than creating a new or alternative model of media power, the internet is instead being used by environmental groups to reaffirm the historical and cultural dominance of established news media outlets.
This article relates news media coverage of major issues in the 1960's to public opinion and to the realities underlying those issues. It challenges some major assumptions—for example, that the media provide a useful picture of what is “really” going on—and discusses implications for policymakers and future research.
Suggests that it might take from two to six months for a national topic of average interest to register among those of importance to the public, and that agenda-setting researchers look a few months prior to fieldwork for the best match between the media agenda and the public's agenda. (FL)
Studies of agenda setting, which asserts that audiences note what is emphasized in the news media and incorporate a similar set of emphases into their personal agendas, are reviewed in this essay. Separate sections consider early empirical evidence in support of the concept; contingent conditions; differing effects of newspapers and television; models of the process; salience of attributes of a topic, issue, or person; domains for research; theory construction and testing; and appropriate research strategies. (AA)
We advance the central proposition of agenda-setting theory - that elements prominent in the mass media's picture of the world influence the salience of those elements in the audience's picture - through the explication of a second level of agenda setting: attribute agenda setting. This preliminary research on candidate images during the 1996 Spanish general election simultaneously examined 2 attribute dimensions - substantive and affective descriptions - to test the hypothesis that media attribute agendas influence the voters' attribute agenda. Empirically, a high degree of correspondence was found between the attribute agendas of 7 different mass media and the voters' attribute agenda for each of the 3 candidates. The median correlation from these 21 tests of the hypothesis is +.72. Sixth-order partial correlations in which the influence of the other 6 mass media are removed from the correlation between a medium's agenda and the voters' agenda for a particular candidate have a median value of +.73. Additional analyses of the attribute agendas of each medium's primary audience in comparison with its principal competitor also yielded evidence of second-level agenda setting. Future research should pursue complex longitudinal designs tracing the impact of media content on voters' images at both the aggregate and individual levels as part of the continuing scholarly dialogue on competing approaches to framing research and attribute agenda setting.
This study investigates changes in the amount of media coverage and in the framing of 5 major infectious diseases in Africa in 4 sub-Saharan African magazines and medical journals. During a 17-year period (1981–1997), HIV/AIDS, a stigmal disease, dominated the coverage from the early to the mid-1990s; however, there was a paucity of such news items in the early 1980s. Nonstigmal diseases, such as malaria and tuberculosis, received much less coverage in proportion to their occurrences. In popular magazines, AIDS was framed as a homosexual, deadly, and lethal disease—but not as such in medical journals. This article presents implications and strategic lessons of those findings for the agenda-setting role of sub-Saharan African media organizations and public health agencies. It also recommends norms for African media's reporting of health issues.
This paper tests how the biotechnology issue, as an example of a major contemporary scientific debate, was framed and reframed by opinion-leading newspapers in Germany, Britain and the United States during the years 2000-2. The research design suggests a theoretical foundation of structure frame categories on the article level, combined with frames on the argument level. Argument framing is analyzed in actors' statements and journalists' own comments. Article framing is analyzed as structures and interpretative patterns in the whole news item. Comparative and cluster analysis of structure frames on the article level, argument frames, and single attributes of the text, shows that certain reframing takes place when media attention increases, in the form of a stronger ethical discourse in Germany and a more prominent public discourse in Britain. In the US opinion-leading press, the scientific-economic discourse is consequent.
The author wishes to thank Mark Levy and Maxwell McCombs as well as Lee Becker, Zhongdang Pan, Se-Wen Sun, Eric Fredin, and Eunkyung Park for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.
This article reports the findings of the multistage agenda-setting process of four Israeli elections. In the first stage, agenda building, it is demonstrated that there is a close association between real-world indicators and media agenda. In the second stage, agenda setting, it was found that the level of television coverage of issues influences the proportion of surveys' respondents naming these issues as the nation's most important problems. In the third stage, priming, the analysis focused on electoral voting behavior in multiparty parliamentary elections rather than on the usual evaluations of the president's performance. At the individual level, there is evidence for a priming effect. At the aggregate level, the findings suggest that there may be a priming effect on the actual electoral success of various political parties.
Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio University, March, 2006. Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-105)
Objective. This article investigates how urban environmental vulnerability to hazards reflects in the perceptions and attitudes of the public in three major cities in Israel: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa. Our central argument is that the differences between the residents’ perceptions and attitudes toward environmental issues are related mostly to the actual hazard levels of their communities, whereas individual differences in socioeconomic characteristics are of lesser importance in this regard. Methods. The research was based on survey data of representative samples of the adult residents in the three cities. The differences in attitudes and perceptions among the three samples were statistically assessed by means of analysis of variance. Results. We found relatively strong and consistent relationships between actual environmental vulnerability to hazards in the three cities and their residents’ attitudes toward environmental issues. The relationships with socioeconomic characteristics, such as education and income, were considerably weaker and less consistent. Conclusions. The results of this research indicate that environmental concern is not exclusive to groups and individuals characterized by postmaterialist values. Rather, the urban public in general is responsive to the environmental vulnerability of its community. This conclusion supports the argument that attitudes toward the environment are mainly affected by instrumental considerations of objective environmental problems rather than by subjective values.
Mass media and environmental awareness among educated city dwellers of Accra
- K Kwansah-Aidoo
Prospects for agenda-setting research in the 21st century
- K Kwansah-Aidoo
The influence and effects of mass media
- D Mcquail
TV, commoditization and environmental degradation: A critical assessment of the utilization of television to promote an environmental ethic
- L E Young
- R J Brulle
Ghana, second ‘dirtiest’ country in West Africa - UNICEF/WHO Joint Monitoring Platform
- G Boyefio