Environment being an extremely gravitious and sensitive aspect, its adequate coverage becomes all the more mandatory. It is almost the backbone of our survival and consistent maintenance on earth. Electronic media needs to lend the required space and structure to the environment that it rightly holds. Its only then that a mature and palpable interaction will be made possible.
Undoubtedly society and electronic media are congenially intertwined. They have very symbiotic relationship and have extraneous influence on each other. However the need is to accommodate environment effectively so that the validity of its essence is comprehended and widespread understanding is generated.
CMS ENVIS Centre has been collating and analysing the prominent news channels coverage on environment and wildlife issues in the month of October – December 2013.
Methodology
Over the years CMS Media Lab has acted as a source for the CMS ENVIS Centre because it has undertaken significant experimentation to develop a robust and rigorous methodology as given below. The content analysis broadly covers qualitative and quantitative aspects.
Prime time band: The prime time programming is the industry benchmark in News television for all significant events and issues that are prominently covered on a particular day.
Six mainstream news channels: Aaj Tak, DD News, ABP News, Zee News, CNN-IBN and NDTV 24X7.
Recording: The recorded tapes were then previewed and the news stories listed under various classifications and categories to generate quantitative data.
Logging: The news content on the above mentioned channels were listed and documented in the log sheets.
Coding: The stories were classified and separately coded (e.g. politics, business, sports, environmental news etc.).
Environment related stories: The theme specific stories were separately reviewed and analysed.
Time frame: The timeline taken for this particular study was October – December 2013.
In the month of October, DD News topped the chart for coverage on Environment & Wildlife by giving maximum time (41 minutes), followed by NDTV (22 minutes), Zee News (2 minutes), CNN-IBN, ABP News and Aaj Tak channel did not cover a single story on environment & wildlife during this time period.
November, the total time spent on covering environment & wildlife stories was (29 minutes) which included 22 minutes of coverage by CNN-IBN, 05 minutes of coverage on NDTV 24X7 and 01 minutes each by Aaj Tak and Zee while DD News intrestingly ABP news had no any coverage.
The month of December reflected tremendous drop in environmental stories coverage. Only NDTV 24X7 spent 11 minutes on environment & wildlife followed by CNN-IBN had given 02 minutes and DD News spent only one minute on the green issues by news channels overall.
The month wise analysis of primetime coverage of stories reveals that as usual the National Politics dominated news channels in all the three months taking the 49%, 37% & 53% of the total primetime in months of October, November and December respectively. In October, international affairs stories hold the second position with 18% of the total primetime coverage which is closely followed by Crime 18% and Film & Entertainment infotainment 15%.
The environment and wildlife stories occupied the almost negilable coverage with just 0.55% of the total primetime telecast in October, 0.26% in November and almost nil in September with (0.11%).
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