An
analysis of news coverage of mountaintop removal mining
November 2005
Excerpts from Media
and Claimsmaker Framing of Controversial Environmental Issues:
A Frame Mapping Analysis of Mountaintop Removal Mining,
a doctoral dissertation at Pennsylvania State University,
discussed at "Covering Coal," an Institute for Rural
Journalism and Community Issues seminar for Central Appalachian
journalists, on Nov. 18, 2005.
By Marc Seamon,
professor of journalism, Marshall University, Huntington, W.Va.
Mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia seemed
to operate virtually unnoticed and unchallenged for nearly 30
years of its 35-year existence. The emergence of strong, widespread
opposition to mountaintop removal mining seemed to coincide
with national media coverage of the issue.
Increased concern about mountaintop mining operations
occurred in 1997 and 1998, both in the media, by federal agencies,
and in notices of intended litigation related to the subject….
Press coverage of public issues with mountaintop mining surfaced
beginning in August 1997, in television, periodicals, and newspapers,
including U.S. News and World Report, ABC’s
‘Nightline’ program, as well as the Charleston
Gazette, The Washington Post, The New York Times, the
Lexington Herald-Leader and The Courier-Journal
of Louisville.
It is unclear what effect the debut of mountaintop
removal mining as an issue in the mass media had and continues
to have on the simultaneous development of social discourse
and subsequent policy decisions regarding the mining technique.
. . .
The media’s role in constructing social
realities is especially powerful for large and complex societies.
In these places, many of the events that comprise the news are
of issues with which local audiences have little or no personal
experience. For the majority of Americans, news coming from
the mountains of southern West Virginia is definitely outside
the bounds of personal experience. Even among West Virginia
residents, few live near mountaintop removal mines or would
have an occasion to learn about them without mediated information
and accounts. Within the state, southern West Virginia or the
“downstate” region is culturally isolated from the
Northern and Eastern panhandles. So even for people in other
areas of the state, the media may be their only source of information
regarding mountaintop removal mining. As such, the opinions
carried in media messages may be the only, or at least the first,
opinions that people encounter. For national audiences, the
social construction of their perceptions of reality in West
Virginia seems equally likely to rely exclusively on the media.
. . .
Setting the agenda
The agenda-setting function of the press has been
shown to be especially powerful for environmental issues (Atwater,
Salwen & Anderson, 1985). For many environmental issues,
media coverage dictates almost exclusively the success or failure
of the issue to enter the arena of public discourse. In fact,
longitudinal studies have suggested that when it comes to environmental
issues, the media agenda is more influential than the public
agenda and real-world conditions (Ader, 1995) or the agenda
of the scientific community (Maher, 1994) in generating widespread
awareness of an issue or of its causes and effects. The agenda-setting
effect of the media operates so convincingly with environmental
issues because they are unobtrusive for the majority of news
consumers (Zucker, 1978). . . .
“The concept of framing is central to an
understanding of the media role in shaping environmental debate”
(Liebler & Bendix, 1996, p. 54). This is because framing,
unlike agenda-setting, provides a way to determine the flavor
of media coverage of environmental issues (Maher, 2001). Framing
on the part of those making the claims involves selecting and
using certain viewpoints and descriptions of an issue while
ignoring others (Entman, 1991). Meanwhile, framing on the part
of media researchers involves searching texts for the patterns
of words, relationships among words, phrases and meanings that
claimsmakers have embedded there. While agenda-setting simply
provides an indication of which issues are being talked about,
framing provides insight into the content and qualities of those
messages. This is particularly important for issues such as
mountaintop removal mining because environmental issues are
generally controversial, with strong viewpoints from at least
two opposing sides seeking to have their opinions becomes the
dominant public opinion. This competition for frame dominance
often unfolds around environmental issues. . . .
Despite the suggested power of the media over public deliberation,
the literature suggests that when it comes to scientific matters,
a category to which many environmental issues belong, the media
are less than savvy. For one thing, news reporters covering
science and the environment rely heavily on “information
subsidies” such as press kits and expert source testimonials
in their stories (Griffin & Dunwoody, 1995). And even with
these aides, many scientists complain that reporters misinterpret
or otherwise incorrectly report even the most basic details.
Also, reporter’s assessments of which environmental issues
are the most important do not agree with scientist’s ratings
(West, Lewis, Greenberg, Sachsman & Rogers, 2003; Maher,
2000).One of the biggest problems reporters seem to have when
covering science or the environment is making the coverage simple
and understandable enough for the non-scientific public that
is their audience (Masterton, 1992). Some suggest that this
difficulty in parlaying understandability to the public stems
from the fact that environmental issues are more complex than
other commonly mediated issues. In fact, the comparative difficulty
of reporting on environmental issues may explain why journalists
are often uninterested in environmental reporting and rate it
a low priority, even while these same journalists acknowledge
that it is high on the public’s priority list (West et
al., 2003). . . .
Advancing the issue
With the issue of mountaintop removal mining,
at least three developments, or manifestations as Lippmann would
call them, occurred near the turn of the 21st century to provide
some news pegs and events on which to hang coverage of the issue.
Those developments included a federal lawsuit over largest mountaintop
removal mine ever proposed, the release of a draft environmental
impact statement by the U.S. EPA, and two straight years of
deadly flooding that experts directly linked to hydrologic changes
resulting from mountaintop removal mining.
The first of these developments involved plans
for a huge mountaintop mine in southern West Virginia. In 1998,
Arch Coal Inc. began moving forward with plans
to open what would be the largest mountaintop removal mine in
history. At 3,100 acres, the Spruce No. 1 Mine would turn nearly
five square miles of forested mountain land into a virtual moonscape.
In light of such a prospect, the West Virginia Highlands
Conservancy filed a federal lawsuit to stop the permit
for the Spruce Mine, asserting that the valley fills that accompany
mountaintop removal mines violate the Clean Water Act . In 1999,
U.S. District Judge Charles Hayden II blocked the permit. The
mine remains unopened, but Arch Coal has continued to push for
permit approval. The legal wrangling over the Spruce Mine permit
and the implications of the Clean Water Act for valley fills
were a clear and unmistakable news peg. Hayden’s ruling
and the promise of appeals and further legal action promised
that never again would the issue lack a news peg. The media
were free to report, and the claimsmakers were free to compete
in an attempt to make their frame the media’s frame, thereby
gaining the coveted conduit to public opinion.
What’s more, the spectacular scale of the
huge Spruce No. 1 Mine and its distinction as the largest mountaintop
mine ever planned helped to put a face on the mountaintop removal
mining issue. It provided the “spectacular” manifestation
needed to help the media get past the problem of reporting on
a seamless environmental issue.
Lawsuits often provide the news peg that results
in media coverage of a longstanding environmental risk. . .
. At about the same time as the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy
lawsuit and the Spruce Mine controversy, another news peg developed
that further justified media attention to the mountaintop removal
mining issue. The Environmental Protection Agency
and four other government agencies had been compiling a huge
and very comprehensive environmental impact statement on mountaintop
removal mining and valley fills. The report was supposed to
be released in 1999, but had fallen behind schedule. By the
year 2000, the EPA still had not set a definite date for completion
of the document, which had already grown to more than 900 pages.
The Charleston Gazette, a newspaper in the
heart of Appalachia, filed a Freedom of Information Act request
to force the EPA to release the document, finished or not. As
a result, the EPA released what it called a preliminary draft
of the report. It is perhaps the most thorough report on mountaintop
removal mining ever written, and, surprisingly to some, strongly
condemns mountaintop removal mining as devastating to plant
and animal life, the area’s watersheds, the land itself
and the people and communities who live in its shadow. The release
of the EPA’s environmental impact statement, even if just
in preliminary draft form, was another strong news peg for media
coverage of the issue.
Finally, devastating floods in 2001 and 2002
provided both the “spectacular” and the “event-centered”
elements needed to make an otherwise chronic but mundane environmental
risk newsworthy. The floods were not the result of excessive
rainfall, but instead occurred after nothing more than normal
early summer rains fell on vast areas of deforested mountaintop
removal mine land. Without the natural vegetation, and with
a greatly altered topography, the ability of the land to handle
even moderate runoff had been severely compromised. As a result,
communities downstream of several newly opened mountaintop removal
mines were devastated. Significant loss of property and life
occurred for two years in a row in the Appalachian Mountains
of West Virginia. As a result, hydrologists warned that the
effects of large-scale mountaintop removal mining on the watersheds
of affected areas may be much more damaging than originally
predicted, even by computer models. (Clines, 2002; Radmacher,
2002). The devastating floods washed out entire hollows, destroyed
homes and drowned residents. Media coverage of the floods consistently
linked the disasters to changes in rainwater runoff resulting
from the deforestation of mountaintop mining, giving the media
a “spectacular” disaster that just had to be reported.
And because the floods were such singular events, not merely
chronic abuses spread over time but punctuated moments of terror
in which potential risk morphed into deadly reality, they provided
the tangible “events” needed to legitimize media
coverage of the issue.
The news peg of a federal lawsuit to block a
mine permit based on the Clean Water Act, the spectacular size
of the huge Spruce No. 1 Mine, and the event-centered nature
of not one but two years of deadly flooding downstream from
deforested mine areas provided multiple opportunities for media
coverage of the mountaintop removal mining issue and subsequently
for claimsmakers to compete for that coverage.
Battle for framing the debate
Since the late 1990s, competition among claimsmakers
for media attention regarding the mountaintop removal mining
issue has been fierce. On one side, environmentalists decry
mountaintop removal mining for the countless affronts it poses
to the forest, land, water and air. Community activists cite
the harm done to Appalachian culture when the mountains—the
area’s history—are destroyed. Coal industry officials
respond by asserting that mountaintop removal mining should
be accepted because of the revenue it generates. Citizens weigh
in on all sides, including varying degrees of moderation.
Reporters looking for varying points of view
to include in their stories don’t have to search for long,
because the strong competition among claimsmakers is never far
away. As one of the newer environmental risk issues to surface
in the mainstream media, mountaintop removal mining, and the
claimsmakers who are invested in it, have benefited from the
trial and error of those who went before them.
Since the environmental movement began to take
off in the 1960s, journalists and claimsmakers have had plenty
of experience dealing with one another on “green”
issues. As a result, claimsmakers pursuing the mountaintop removal
mining issue are quite media savvy. Organizations such as Environmental
Media Services exist solely to “provide journalists
with the most current information on environmental issues”
(Environmental Media Services, 2003). . . .
What they appear to tell us is that media framing
of mountaintop removal mining seems to have become more sophisticated
(despite a reduction in the total number of frames) as the arguments
the media put forth have evolved. The media do indeed seem to
be setting their own frames for the issue. They do not seem
to be adopting claimsmaker frames, although overall, the tone
of media coverage seems more sympathetic to opponents of mountaintop
removal mining than to supporters.
A look at the frames used in the first period
of media text shows what appears to be an emphasis on the big,
obvious and sensational aspects of mountaintop removal mining
— particularly the huge machines used to create the massive
mines. Obviously, it takes big machines to tear down a mountain,
and journalists from this early period seemed to latch onto
that news peg as perhaps a place to begin the story. Thinking
about the norms and conventions of journalism, it is easy to
see why a reporter might focus on the larger-than-life aspects
of the issue, including the size of the machines and the area
mined. Those aspects seem to capture the elemental spirit of
the early mountaintop removal mining story. Notice the emphasis
some of the frames place on machines, trucks, bulldozers and
draglines. . . .
[This research] of the first media period would
suggest that reporters were taking a textbook approach to journalism
and attempting to present both sides equally—or at least
to make the distinction between the two sides as clear as possible.
. . .
It is interesting that no frames emerged from
the media or claimsmaker texts dealing with energy-related terms.
Much of the debate about coal hinges on its identity as a primary
energy source for America. Supporters claim that coal is an
important energy source because of America’s dependence
on it. Conversely, opponents argue that the same dependence
shows weakness and a lack of sustainability and foresight in
America’s energy policy. But neither supporters nor opponents
pursued an energy-related frame, despite the fact that it would
be easy for both to do so.
Media treatment evolves
Clearly, media framing of the issue changed from
the first period to the second. The total number of frames went
down, yet the complexity and sophistication of the messages
seemed to increase. The media seemed to evolve their own voice
on the issue—one that opposes mountaintop removal mining
but adopts neither the exact frames nor the patterns of discourse
of opposing claimsmakers. . . .
In the current study, opposing claimsmakers seem
to have generated a set of relatively successful frames related
to water. The flood frame dealt with the deadly flooding. The
stream, aquatic and water frames dealt to varying degrees with
the Clean Water Act and the Surface Mine Reclamation and Control
Act and issues of protecting streams from mining operations.
These frames were successful in that they led to an injunction
stopping the Spruce No. 1 Mine as well as national media coverage
of the issue that turned out to be quite sympathetic to the
opponents’ agenda. . . .
This study and others like it can help journalists
better understand the role they play and the power they wield
in society. Our estimates of the media’s power to influence
public opinion have gone from early “magic bullet”
theories that overestimated media influence to limited effects
paradigms that may have shortchanged them and finally to the
middle ground of contemporary media theory that suggests the
media may have a moderate degree of power in shaping public
life. . . .
The current study seems to support the notion
that the media play a powerful but not omnipotent role in discourse
surrounding controversial environmental issues. Note that in
the current study, the media did not adopt either claimsmaker’s
frames for the mountaintop removal mining issue. These results
suggest that, in the case of mountaintop removal mining, the
media did not adopt themes of convenience made readily available
by claimsmakers attempting to advance their agendas. Instead,
the media -- as the literature suggests they often do in controversial
environmental issues -- acted as watchdogs, operating as adversaries
of official sources (the media frames were, in many cases, thematically
opposed to the industry frames) while maintaining autonomy from
those claimsmakers also operating as adversaries of the coal
industry. The ultimate result of the media’s framing decisions
seems to be that much of the information the public receives
regarding mountaintop removal mining is not and never has been
the unfiltered assertions of claimsmakers. As such, the media
have retained their influence as gatekeepers for this issue.
. . .
Reporters often review past coverage of an issue
to get background on which to base their current efforts. Typically,
newsroom research of that type involves reading clippings that
another reporter has collected or visiting the paper’s
archive or the library. Part of the utility in that exercise
is to gain a factual understanding of the issue, but there is
more. In addition to absorbing facts, reporters are also noticing
how an issue was covered. What they do with that information
is up to them. They may try to emulate past coverage and match
its tone, or they may try to approach it from a fresh angle
with a different perspective. Either way, what they are engaged
in is a type of framing study. They are considering how the
issue was framed in the past, and they are then making framing
decisions of their own as they proceed with their reporting.
It has always been hard to persuade journalists
to accept and use academic research in the newsgathering and
reporting endeavors (Pew Center, 2000). However, frame mapping
analysis of current issues can be useful to journalists by providing
a richer, more thorough picture of how they and their predecessors
have framed an issue. Reporters actively seek insight into such
matters already, so convincing them that the need is there should
not be a problem. Persuading them to accept the method may be
difficult. Many working journalists with no academic research
experience may be turned off by the idea of interpreting a frame
mapping study such as this one. But if the results can be brought
to bear in the newsroom, the effect will be a benefit to journalists
trying to discern how issues have been covered in the past.
Many journalists, because of their training,
are quite aware of effect that word choice and word usage can
have on a message. As people attuned to the importance of word
choice and word usage, journalists should be quick to recognize
the semantic utility of frame mapping analysis, which is based
on the association and co-occurrence of key words in text. Seeing
the nuanced patterns of word associations that comprise the
results of a frame mapping analysis can help journalists fine-tune
their understanding and use of terms for a given issue. This
semantic utility, along with the benefit of better discerning
thematic trends in past coverage, are the principal implications
of frame mapping analysis for journalists.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
As of 2004, Marc Seamon had 10 years of professional
media experience in newspaper and radio. He has a bachelor’s
degree in communication (West Liberty State College 1996), a
master’s degree in journalism (West Virginia University,
1998) and a master’s degree in educational psychology
(West Virginia University, 2000). His journalism thesis was
a longitudinal examination of sensationalism in daily newspapers.
His educational psychology thesis was a comparison of instructional
effectiveness between intensive and semester-length courses.
In 2001, he accepted a Ph.D. fellowship at the Pennsylvania
State University, where his research interests evolved to focus
on newspaper content analysis and frame mapping analysis. He
has numerous publications and conference papers. Seamon works
with displacement theory, which is an extension of gatekeeping
research that examines the effect of major news events on the
rest of the daily news mix. He also works with frame mapping
analysis to track claimsmaker and media framing as independent
variables that affect public opinion and policy. In 2004, Seamon
was hired as assistant professor of journalism at Marshall University.
When not working, Seamon enjoys distance running, studying the
natural world, and hunting in the woods and fields of West Virginia.
