Trends and patterns in sustainability-related media coverage: A classification of issue-level attention
研究了2000-2016年五国23家报纸对十项可持续发展挑战的报道趋势，发现气候变化、贫困和HIV/AIDS的报道以信息驱动为主，其他议题则受噪音驱动，且生物多样性和清洁技术报道被气候变化报道所挤入。
Sustainability has moved from fringe topic to headline news and key policy discourse in its own right. Yet, the sustainability discourse remains fragmented, with a diverse set of challenges receiving vastly different levels of attention. Nevertheless, the vast majority of previous studies have focused on media attention to climate change, whereas other sustainability challenges have received much less attention in the academic literature. In this paper, we explore trends and patterns in media coverage across a set of ten sustainability challenges. In particular, we are interested in the extent to which the recent trends and patterns in coverage that have been well-documented for climate change are reflected by other sustainability challenges. We utilise a sample of 23 broadsheet newspapers from five different countries (Australia, Canada, Germany, UK, US), covering a 17-year period from 2000 to 2016. Using the agenda-setting literature as a starting-point for our enquiry, we then turn to the toolset provided by financial econometrics to develop a basic typology of media attention focusing on the two dimensions information/noise and seasonality/non-seasonality. We find that media coverage on climate change, poverty and HIV/AIDS can mainly be characterized as information, whereas the remaining seven issues included in our study appear noise-driven. Seasonal patterns in coverage appear most pronounced for socioeconomic issues. Media attention to biodiversity and cleaner technologies has been crowded in by increased coverage on climate change. At the same time, we find clear divergences from overall trends and patterns at the level of different countries and individual newspapers.