This research is placed in the interdisciplinary field called visual studies, and carries the tools of textual analysis to the critical theory of research-action in the area of education about communication media.
The work concerns a educational approach of the discursive strategies discernible in the treatment by the news media of the issue of sustainability, and in particular, of the processes of meaning direction which these strategies given rise to within the concept of “sustainable development”.
A textual analysis of the framing procedures present in the news media, both in the press and on television, reveals the selectivity, the prominence and the stabilisation of meaning constructs which dissuasively project not only the knowledge but also the tensions and conflicts associated with the environmental question against a background of uncertainty, danger and risk, or of crisis and catastrophe, depending on the particular case concerned.
By focussing their frame of intelligibility of the environment on the expectation of imminent and inexorable dangers, news reports demand and determine the action of the subject on the text, leading to the creation of social representations among the public. Under the pressure of urgency, of necessity and of global threat, these representations both confront and restrict the pertinence of other expositions and ways of thinking concurrent within the definition of environmental problems. Even in cases where those news texts deal with procedures of scientific disclosure regarding the risks of environmental deterioration, they do so with a polemical attitude, as if presenting a tacit defence against possible refutations which could lead to questioning of the pertinence of the privileged nature-object under threat of total collapse.
A study of the discursive strategies implied in such procedures clearly shows the way in which the treatment and the construction placed upon informative objects by the media, along with the influx of strength that they receive, do not deal merely with the processes of constructing knowledge, nor do they necessarily aim at a greater understanding of the complex of variables in play within the conformation of relationships with surroundings. On the contrary, they frequently give privileged status to the immersion of the reader in a polemical discursive universe dominated by the dramatic and spectacular logic of danger and of the immediacy of crisis in detriment to other voices and arguments which might question this definition of the framework of intelligibility of environmental problems.
From this textual perspective, the information diffused by the news media contributes to the processes of normalisation and institutionalisation of our sense of the environmental and of his re-meaning as a model of development and sustainability, which is both symbolic and ideologically slanted.
This research has provided methodological tools and procedures for the education about the media, through a pedagogical approach of the analysis and reconstruction of the contents related to the environmental issue that focuses on the discursive, cognitive and persuasive strategies that are at their base.
This work relates the results of research activities led by the UNESCO Chair of Sustainable Development and Environmental Education of the University of the Basque Country as part of the Project entitled “The Media Construction of Sustainability”.