Article Abstract 2

Environmental problems become public problems only after they become visible, and visibility is something the media confer. This paper asks how media — the legacy press and broadcasting alongside digital and social platforms — work as the connective tissue between expert knowledge of ecological risk and the everyday awareness of ordinary citizens. Working within an interpretive paradigm, the study uses qualitative content analysis and thematic analysis of documented cases of environmental communication and the scholarship surrounding them, rather than primary data gathered from human participants. The corpus ranges across global and Indian episodes, from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and decades of climate-change coverage to the Chipko movement, the Narmada Bachao Andolan, and recent social-media mobilisations such as the global youth climate strikes and India’s urban tree-felling protests. Four interlocking themes emerged: media as agenda-setters that decide which ecological concerns reach the public; media as framers that supply the interpretive lenses through which audiences make sense of those concerns; the participatory, networked awareness opened up by social media; and the recurring distortions of sensationalism, episodic framing, and greenwashing that can hollow out awareness even while appearing to raise it. The paper argues that media do not merely transmit environmental information; they help constitute what counts as an environmental issue in the first place. Yet it also cautions that mediated awareness is necessary but not sufficient for environmental action, because attention is fragile, framing is contestable, and visibility can be manufactured. The findings carry practical implications for environmental journalists, science communicators, educators, and civil-society organisations who seek not merely to inform audiences but to sustain durable public engagement with the ecological crisis.
Keywords: environmental communication; media framing; agenda-setting; environmental awareness; social media; qualitative content analysis