Environmental coverage in five Lebanese daily newspapers from 2011 to 2013

Abstract

This thesis critically examined the way environmental articles were framed during 2011, 2012 and 2013 by the leading five Lebanese daily newspapers written in Arabic according to circulation: An-Nahar, Al-Balad, As-Safir, Al-Akhbar and Al-Joumhouria because they are agents of public education and in raising public awareness. The coding of the articles was created on a pre-defined coding scheme based on ten variables. The categorization of the articles titles was based on the articles main topic that depicted into eight categories and then a deeper review of the article first few lines title lead to twenty sub-categories. The data was analyzed using the IBM SPSS 20 Statistical Package for the Social Sciences Version 19 and distribution tests were used to examine the number of articles according to the different variables. The Pearson Chi-Square test (χ2) and the Kruskal-Wallis test were used to study and compare the relationship between the variables. Descriptive data showed that the overall number of published environmental articles during 2011, 2012 and 2013 is n=1197. The ranking of the newspapers with the highest number of environmental articles started with As-Safir (43.1%), Al-Akhbar (34.7%) and An-Nahar (20.6%) followed by Al-Balad (1%) and Al-Joumhouria (0.7%). Most of the articles are published in the "Land" category (43%) and the lowest category was the "Heritage and Culture" (3%) category. Most of the publications were during April and July (121 articles) and the lowest publications were during September (82 articles) and November (77 articles). The sub-category "Ministerial Environmental Activities" (22.81%) presented the highest number of articles on a yearly basis for all newspapers. A reason for this might be that the majority of newspapers purely reported the environmental ministerial activities. Lastly, results stated that more than half of the published articles (799 articles) had word Numbers between 245 and 1353 and 70.3% of the articles had a picture next to the text. The dedicated sections for the environment are: "Environment" (42.98%) on page 12 in As-Safir, "Community" (22.83%) in Al-Akhbar and "Environment and Heritage" (20.32%) on page 22 in An-Nahar. The majority of articles are published on Tuesdays (486 articles) and on Wednesdays (293) and the author with the most published articles is Mr.Habib Maalouf with a total of 221 articles.