ENVIRONMENTAL REPORTING IN INDIAN

TELEVISION

Presented by, Amaljith N.K 15386040

Despite the growth of social media in the last few years it is still the mainstream media that influences public opinion. Of the 82,222 newspapers and 626 television channels in the country, space allotted to coverage of environmental issues in less than 1.5 percent.

Environment stories have a hard time competing with a political or economic story, and seldom see front page coverage. Sometimes editors also ignore environmental stories by telling that they are not newsworthy.

Look up the website of any leading English daily in India: 'Environment' is usually not a marker you can reach easily.

In 'The Hindu' it's nestled under 'Science and Technology‘.

In 'Hindustan Times', there just is no label .

In spite of the fact that environment has become an extremely grave and sensitive issue over the years not only in India but across the globe, Indian television news channels, an acclaimed feature of the electronic media, have still not impressively taken up the cause.

The dearth of environmental coverage is certainly not due to unavailability of visual material or lack of

conflict; but because the TV channels apparently go by the policy “why bore people with country’s efforts with regard to environmental protection when they can be entertained instead.”

While pointing at the non-priority status of environmental news and issues in the television newsrooms, the reports expressed concern over limited knowledge of reporters that, many times, leads to environmental catastrophe.

The stories suffer content limitations, typically providing little qualification or support from scientific data, making vague references to the scientific communication, and emphasizing sensationalist aspect.

As part of its study, CMS ENVIS Centre undertook regular analysis of the primetime, between 7 PM and 11 PM, news content aired by six widely viewed television news channels of India, during the period from 2009 to 2013.

The channels chosen for the study included DD News, Aaj Tak, CNN IBN, NDTV 24X7, Star News (Now ABP News) and Zee News.

Year-wise analysis of the news channels revealed that news on politics, sports, entertainment and crime had maximum coverage in five years, while less than one percent of the total time was devoted to issues like environment and wildlife.

In 2009, as the study found, the coverage on environment was only 1.53% and news on politics was 20.36%.

In the year 2010, the coverage of sports news was 17.93% against 1.29% for environment news.

Since 2011 to year 2013, politics remained dominant while environment news coverage was on sharp decline since 2009.

It was found that in the last five years, media rarely focused on various environmental issues such as agriculture, weather, natural disaster and wildlife.

Famous Environmental journalists

Bahar Dutt

Keya Acharya

Santosh Shintre

Pathralekha Chatterjee

Shyam Parekh

As environment plays a vital role in keeping the earth suitable for human civilisation, news and issues related to it need to be given required importance and adequate space by the media as display of its responsibility.

Thank you