Läänemere reostustemaatika kajastamisest Eesti Päevalehes 2006. aastal

Siim Lõvi´s bachelor thesis ”Coverage of the Baltic Sea pollution thematic in Eesti Päevaleht in 2006” analyses how the newspaper kept an important environmental issue on public agenda and how the problem was framed throughout the year. The topic of sea pollution was first introduced at the newspaper agenda in the end of January when a widespread oil leakage was found on the North-Western shore of Estonia, killing thousands of seabirds. Drawing upon Ulrich Beck’s risk society theory, a theoretical presupposition to the current analysis is that media has an influential role in defining risks, especially in the case when the topic is unknown for the audience and hence all information about it is meditated by media. Thus for the public it is crucial, how the media portraits risks - such as oil leakage in the Baltic Sea. Media has to cover a risk thoroughly to keep the public concerned. The debate in the opinion section of the newspaper is also vital for the development of ideas how to deal with risks. Those ideas can lead to political actions that might resolve the insufficiencies that became apparent in dealing with oil leakages. In the analysis, 225 articles published on the issue in Eesti Päevaleht during 2006 were analysed, using both the quantitative content analysis method and the qualitative analysis. The results of the study show that the daily Eesti Päevaleht covered the topic of sea pollution widely when there was a newsworthy event. However on other periods, the coverage was much lower which leads to the conclusion that the public debate on opinion pages did not show continuity. Only on some occasions there where opinion articles that reintroduced the problem. Besides covering the main topic of sea pollution and its effects on wildlife, four distinct frames where found in the analyzed articles. First, there was a significant number of articles dealing with the topic of political responsibility during the first of five periods analyzed. The frame mostly associated with sea pollution was the problem of resource insufficiency. Eesti Päevaleht covered proposals how to improve the situation, however did not offer any actual solutions. Nor did it question their validity. Also the lack of effective resolutions to sea pollution episodes was framed as an error of the official’s judgment and as a result of legitimate and organizational faults. Eesti Päevaleht succeeded in contextualizing individual events of sea pollution into a wider problem. Criticism of the lack of (state) resources to combat sea pollution led to a larger debate on the underfinancing of the entire internal security system in Estonia.http://tartu.ester.ee/record=b2117860~S1*es