Understanding Influences, Misinformation, and Fact-Checking Concerning Climate-Change Journalism in Pakistan

Politics triumphs: a topic modeling approach of analyzing news media coverage of climate change in Pakistan

“…However, we have not come across any study that has tried to investigate the quantity, themes, and evolution of climate change news coverage. Nonetheless, the previous studies that are concerned with Pakistan and climate change news coverage show that environmental reporters face various levels of influence, i.e., lack of incentives, resource-intensive nature of climate reporting, and pressure to self-censor from corporations while investigating their climate degradations practices, which significantly shape their climate stories [Ejaz et al, 2022]. Apart from news stories, some scholars have also examined editorial coverage of environmental issues.…”

“…Notwithstanding the general paucity of climate change communication research originating from the Global South, some specific progress has been made [e.g., Hase, Mahl, Schäfer & Keller, 2021;Keller, Hase, Thaker, Mahl & Schäfer, 2020;Newman, Fletcher, Robertson, Eddy & Nielsen, 2022]. However, Pakistan, a fifth most populous country that is ranked among top ten most vulnerable to climate change [Eckstein, Künzel, Schäfer & Winges, 2019;Ejaz, Ittefaq & Arif, 2022;Kamboh, Ittefaq & Yousaf, 2022] has seldom been part of such empirical studies that examine news media coverage of climate change [Schäfer & Schlichting, 2014], thus highlighting a research gap. To fill this void, specifically concerning Pakistan, two recent studies understanding climate journalism found that journalists in the country face numerous challenges [Sharif & Medvecky, 2018], including missing relevant educational background, lack of support from the newsroom, and pushback from corporations which in turn significantly influence their coverage of the issue [Ejaz et al, 2022].…”

The Global South and Climate Coverage: From News Taker to News Maker

“…For example, as researchers from Pakistan, we closely monitored how the national and global media covered the 2022 floods and how rapidly and deeply it was linked to a broader climate change narrative, both nationally and internationally (Rannard, 2022; United Nations, 2022). Although research by Ejaz and colleagues (2021) shows that in the past, developing countries like Pakistan have mostly been “takers” of a global climate narrative till now and have mostly mirrored Northern discourse and framing, Najam (2022a) expects that in the age of adaptation, low-emission high-impact Global South countries will increasingly become makers of climate narratives and reporting. We believe that the expected rapid increase in local climate impacts (IPCC, 2022) is likely to (a) add more complexity to current global media trends on climate coverage and (b) substantively introduce more divergent, possibly contentious, directions within the global media’s climate discourse.…”

Newspaper coverage of water security issues in the water‐stressed Northern Province of Sri Lanka: An explorative study of three Tamil dailies

“…Lack of knowledge on environmental questions in general and an attitude of lethargy on the part of the media personnel to learn were attributed as reasons for poor coverage of environmental issues in the form of editorials (Boyagoda, 2016(Boyagoda, , 2017Reza & Haque, 2011). Ejaz et al (2021) reporting on climate journalism in Pakistan noted that journalists there lacked expertise and domain-specific knowledge that prevented them from informing the public about the underlying root causes and drastic effects of climate change. This resulted in them producing cursory news content, far from being able to fill the role of civic educators (Ejaz et al, 2021).…”

“…Ejaz et al (2021) reporting on climate journalism in Pakistan noted that journalists there lacked expertise and domain-specific knowledge that prevented them from informing the public about the underlying root causes and drastic effects of climate change. This resulted in them producing cursory news content, far from being able to fill the role of civic educators (Ejaz et al, 2021). In a comparative study of representation of environmental news between New Zealand and Malaysia, Nik Hasan (2007) commented on factors such as journalists' awareness of organizational determinants of news and editorial policies towards the environment as well as journalists' lack of knowledge about environmental issues and science as problematic.…”