Climate Change Photographs in Online Newspapers: A Visual Content Analysis
NOPR - NISCAIR Online Periodicals Repository
View Archive InfoField | Value | |
Title |
Climate Change Photographs in Online Newspapers: A Visual Content Analysis
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Creator |
PARVEEN, HUMA
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Subject |
Climate Change
Online Newspapers Gender Photographs Visual Content Analysis |
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Description |
10-33
Climate change has emerged as the most pressing concern for humankind, given the rapidly depleting natural resources and burgeoning issues of pollution and waste posing a grave threat to the planet’s survival. While the magnitude of the problem has grown exponentially, there has also been a slight increase in the quantum of discussion on climate change in social circles. News media bear the onus of not only reporting on climate change to spread awareness, but they’re in fact educators for a large part of the population. Photographs embedded in news stories have a profound effect on the audiences in that they immediately reduce the distance between the readers and ground zero. These photographs are chosen with great precision by editors, in order to evoke the desired sentiment. These news photographs can also have far-reaching effects on the promotion of gender equality, which is a key concern in sustainable development. Objective: The present study has been designed to conduct a visual content analysis of photographs incorporated in climate change news stories in mainstream online newspapers in India. Online newspapers have been incorporated owing to the growing propensity of a large populace to receive their news through digital devices like smart phones, laptops and tablets. It would help in examining the climate change imagery being employed by online newspapers, which goes a long way in shaping readers’ perceptions about the burning issue. Methodology: The newspapers chosen are the online editions of The Hindu, The Hindustan Times, and The Times of India, keeping in view their wide reach and popularity. The newspapers are scanned for climate change stories over a period of two months (December 2020 and January 2021) with the analysis. The stories with keywords ‘climate’, ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ in the headline or lead paragraph were selected for data collection. The corpus of images thus obtained is quantified and analysed to ascertain the depiction of gender in terms of activity. Further, the data is scrutinised from several perspectives, ranging from analysing gender representation in the stories from various sources (internal staff, or national/international news agencies) to the spectrum of topics covered. Implications: The study follows a unique approach as it inspects the climate change imagery along several dimensions not undertaken hitherto by any other study. It would also be pertinent to understand the visual representation of gender in people’s daily dose of online news, which has strong agenda-setting influences on society. |
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Date |
2023-03-22T10:25:59Z
2023-03-22T10:25:59Z 2023-03 |
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Type |
Article
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Identifier |
2278-2796 (Online); 2278-2788 (Print)
http://nopr.niscpr.res.in/handle/123456789/61579 https://doi.org/10.56042/jst.v10i3.68674 |
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Language |
en
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Publisher |
CSIR-NIScPR
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Source |
JST Vol.11(1) [January-March 2023]
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