Print Media Coverage of Environmental Issues in the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Ecolinguistic Analysis

Abstract

The coverage of environmental issues is of great importance to Moroccan newspapers, namely As-Sabah, Al-Akhbar, and Al-Massae. The present study explores the frequency of articles that covered environmental issues and investigated the newspapers’ professionalism in writing environmental reports on man’s environmental setting violations. The Research was accomplished through the framework of ecolinguistics to categorize and analyze all environmental stories that extended from March to July 2020. The sums of 308 issues of the three newspapers were manually checked to identify the issues reported about environmental problems. The findings revealed that environmental coverage by the three newspapers was feeble. Precisely, only 73 newspaper issues pertaining to the three newspapers contained at least one environmental title. Practically, identified environmental articles were manually searched and treated based on a keyword selection such as environment, forest, animals, water, pollution, air, irrigation, deforestation, and overgrazing, among other words. In total, the final sum of environmental articles published by the three newspapers during the COVID-19 period were 92 articles (1.8%) over 4922 total articles published by 73 issues. The role of print media is determinant in covering environmental topics to maintain the public informed about the protection of environmental resources during the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, this role is far from being achieved given the feeble interest devoted to environmental issues and the way through which the newspapers have produced environmentally based stories. To remedy this situation, some recommendations are afforded to improve the writing of environmental reports in line with ecolinguistics principles and environmental journalism ethics.

Eco-Linguistic Analysis of ‘Dawn’ Newspaper: A Corpus Based Study

“…Concern for power is covered by these two major aspects of society, and it is today's reality. This analysis resembles to the findings of a research in which newspaper articles were analyzed in terms of ecology but unfortunately, given the lack of attention given to environmental issues and the manner in which newspapers have generated articles based on environmental issues, the duty of newspapers is far from being fulfilled (Mliless & Larouz, 2020).…”

“…The teachers should raise awareness among students regarding ecology in language learning settings (Al-Jamal & Al-Omari, 2014). Mliless & Larouz (2020) covered the environmental issues in Morocco, named Al-Massae, As-Sabah, and Al-Akhbar. The primary purpose of this research was to analyze the frequency of the articles that covered problems based on the environment.…”

Framing Deforestation Discourse in Tanzanian Media: An Analysis of Framing Strategies in Daily News and the Guardian Newspapers

“…People can make choices to act and behave likely to the framed message in the newspaper [9]. Different researchers have observed the significance and impacts of particular frames in the news by directing their concerns to the people's understanding of actions and matters [14,2,15,16,7,17,3]. Having these studies and even others, there are not enough indicators that can be used to measure the occurrence of common frames in the news, but "a reliable set of content analytic indicators is necessary for studying developments in the news over time and similarities and differences in the ways in which politics and other topics of national and international importance are framed in the news in different countries" [18].…”