Environmental issues, the Finnish major press, and public opinion

Abstract

This paper reports some preliminary findings of the ongoing Finnish research project 'Mass Media, the Public, and Environmental Politics'. The present study experiments with macro-level methods by comparing developments of environmental attitudes with changes in the environmental coverage of the major Finnish daily paper Helsingin Sanomat. After the first peak at the beginning of the 1970's the environmental coverage dropped. Since the beginning of the eighties the coverage has grown rather consistently along with the growth and bringing to a head of environmental problems. Public opinion did not follow very systematically the development of media environmental coverage. In the 1980's public concern did generally increase parallel with coverage, but demands for protection of the environment and willingness to make personal sacrifices to that end did not. This is partly due to the fact that the 1980's saw globalization of environmental problems, and the means of preventing them and putting things right receded from peoples immediate grasp and political capability.

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