Age and Environmental Citizenship: A Case Study of Media Coverage of the 2019 Local Body Elections in New Zealand

Date
2021-06-22
Authors
Rupar, V
Hope, W
Hammill, A
Supervisor
Item type
Journal Article
Degree name
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
MDPI
Abstract

Environmental issues in the coverage of the elections are usually framed in relation to voters’ attitudes towards the specific problems, for instance, water quality or land use. The environment is not given standing in these discussions, rather, it is an instrument or resource for voters. In this article we investigate the relationship between news and politics by looking at media coverage of the 2019 local body elections in New Zealand. We follow a call to put place at the centre of journalism research and to investigate the emerging forms of environmental citizenship. We focus on a media market at each end of New Zealand’s two main islands and relate analysis of the coverage of local body elections coverage to related social groups engaged in environmental issues. The objective of our article is to consider the extent to which age plays a role in media representation of environmental issues in the context of local body elections.

Description
Keywords
Media; Elections; Environment; Age; Citizenship
Source
Journal. Media. 2021, 2, 321-334. https://doi.org/10.3390/journalmedia2030019
Rights statement
Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).