Abstract

This thesis examined news content on the Albertan bituminous sands to document a Canadian contemporary issue and to improve the available conceptual frameworks for analyzing environmental issues covered in the news media. There is currently limited research on the topic from a journalistic perspective, despite a body of literature on environmental journalism that predicts (and cautions that) the environmental news coverage of bitumen will be event-driven, overly simplified, increasingly politicised and economically framed. Building on these predictions, the project uses a case study approach as a bounded illustration of environmental journalism, in combination with content analysis to reflect on the intrinsic, multifaceted and complex attributes of environmental affairs in the news coverage. A typology developed in this thesis allowed for an examination of 409 news articles from five Canadian newspapers from the years 2007 to 2009, and gave evidence: for a sustained interest from the newspapers to report on Alberta bitumen; for an evenly distributed and broad variety, albeit asymmetrical presence of news sources that favored politicians, industrial and environmental interests; and for the presence of multiple types of information in the examined news, though concentrated mostly on economic aspects of bitumen, and lesser on ecological, political, scientific and other dimensions.