Environmental Awareness In Newspapers

Recently environmental concerns have been becoming the focus of public media. For the public media has the responsibility of reporting and analyzing the exiting environmental problems, influencing and directing the public opinion, helping the society construct and improve the environmental awareness, it has to augment its own environmental awareness first. Thus, it is of extreme realistic interest for us to choose the environmental awareness of newspapers as the topic, analyze the variation over the last two decades.We investigate the twenty year environmental coverage of Xiamen Daily, utilizing the content analysis, in which we adopt the same standards as used in Friends of Nature, i.e., the environmental attention, participation, deepness, and greenness of newspapers. In our work, the four different indices are combined with the overall environmental awareness as the criteria. Although the situations are rather complicated in terms of each individual index, the environmental awareness of Xiamen Daily has an increasing trend in total. Besides it is interesting to note that a large amount of new ideas and fresh terms have been brought to our life through newspapers. Further we make a comparison between our analysis with the analysis in Friends of Nature and other newspapers, and find some consistency. In the last part, we discussed the influential factors and gave some suggestion to enhance the environmental awareness in newspapers.We would like to emphasize the following striking features of our work. The study of the environmental awareness of newspapers and the relating fields have not been well investigated in the past. And it is really a new temp to use the content analysis to thoroughly construct various indices of environmental awareness in the literature.