Mixing Oil and Water: An Examination of the Media Propaganda Model in News Coverage of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster

Information about the environmental and health repercussions of an environmental disaster is crucial for successful remediation, for obtaining due compensation, and for preventing future disasters. The public receives most of its information about science and environmental issues from the news media, so what the news media include in their stories and how they frame such disasters has implications for citizens and society, particularly as these high consequence events become more common. The 2010 Gulf oil spill provides a specific case to examine how different forms of news media may differ in their news coverage. Using the media propaganda model as a theoretical framework, this study hypothesized that corporate news media outlets would differ in both the quantity of sub-topics or domains (such as environment, health, economy, risk, uncertainty, and environmental justice) that they employed in their stories, and in the quality of the thematic framing of their stories. This research suggests that not only do corporate media outlets favor economic domains over environmental, health, and risk domains in their stories as compared to independent media outlets, but corporate media outlets also qualitatively frame these stories differently. While independent media outlets tend to stress the risks and effects to the environment and to public health using a precautionary perspective that is more in line with the public interest, corporate media outlets frame the environmental and health risks and effects from a more optimistic perspective, requiring more certitude before accepting the deleterious effects of the Gulf oil spill and employing a perspective in line with the profit model upon which their companies are based. Consequently, the public will tend to receive less news about the issues of particular value to them from the mainstream, more widely disseminated corporate media. This disparity between corporate and independent media systems in their coverage of a disaster such as the Gulf oil spill has implications for the news industry as a whole by suggesting that independent media outlets may better serve the public interest and that reform may be needed within the corporate media so that they may better serve as the fourth estate.