Air pollution is looked upon as an emerging concern in India, as it is becoming a serious health threat for people living in densely populated towns and cities, with children and elderly being most at risk. The World Air Quality Report stated India as the third most polluted country in the world in 2023. India’s annual PM 2.5 was 54.4 µg/m3. New Delhi was declared as the most polluted capital city globally. This report says that air pollution is a global health catastrophe and highlighted that air quality is going to be the most challenging problems for urban Indian cities in coming days.
Air pollution is reported every year on national dailies with stories varying from stubble burning to closing of educational institutions, but does the reportage cover crucial aspects and factors that lead to soaring air pollution in Indian cities? Despite its implications for society at large, climate change is difficult to perceive and understand for most lay audiences (Hase et al., 2021). As a complex and unobtrusive issue, people often encounter it via news media (Newman et al., 2020). The news media attention to climate change plays an important role in influencing public opinion by helping people to better understand the complexities of the issue to make their demand for action more vocal.
Primafacie, air quality/air pollution and climate change are observed as two independent issues but interwoven with each other on regional and global level due to non-linear and bi-directional interactions between the two. The on-going global climate change debate is making the understanding of the problem of air quality difficult to deal with, whereas the poor air quality is enhancing the magnitude and frequency of climate change implications.
With this understanding, the study aims to look into the levels of issue attention towards climate change with an emphasis on air quality news coverage in the national editions of selected newspapers over a time period. The study further aims to explore the prevalence of frames, themes, topics and dimensions (scientific, ecological and societal) in the news-media coverage of the issue. The study also intends to explore how the stories of climate change with reference to air quality coverage, perceives and reports the discussion of science and scientists in the analysed news-stories.
The study will use a cross-sectional, mix-method, descriptive research approach and will use Structured Topic Modelling (STM) to identify frames, themes, topics and dimensions in the news corpus and its mapping to overarching themes and dimensions. The structured topic modelling will help us to explore the news coverage inductively across newspapers and time. Aggregated category frames will be considered to entail more complex theoretical concepts.
The newspapers articles for this study will be coded using both open and axiomatic coding. Open coding will involve scrutinizing the contents and context of newspapers articles very closely – line by line, word by word in order to unearth distinct categories or narratives across articles. Axiomatic coding, or axial coding aims to link these categories by uncovering ‘which types of phenomena, contexts, frames, themes, topics, causal and intervening conditions and consequences are relevant for the study’. These techniques will also be used to measure the prevalence of narratives and themes, both separately and in relation to one another.
This study aims to look into the coverage of air quality news in national dailies of India to explore how it influences public concern about climate change. It intends to find out how journalists portray air pollution as a more pervasive issue through the content of news by emphasizing the socio-political dimensions of the coverage.
Using a cross-sectional, mix-method and a descriptive approach, the study will analyse the levels of media attention in terms of content and frequency of coverage in selected national dailies on a standardized framework. The study will approach content analysis as an analytical technique for identifying, analysing and reporting themes within a data set of news stories related to air pollution. The news-stories from the corpus will be coded for thematic generation. An inductive approach will be used for coding the news-stories.
For primary observations, the thematic observations and analysis will be presented to some Atmospheric Scientists to know their views on the news-coverage of air-quality stories. The scientists for interviews will be selected on a pan-Indian basis, and the selection criteria will apply to the diverse professional experience and their day-to-day engagement with the pressing issues climate change.
The study will include the national edition of six dailies - Times of India, The Indian Express, Hindustan Times, The Telegraph, Deccan Herald, The Hindu for a selected period and the stories will be evaluated on the basis of their negotiation of the issue with both public and private agencies of governance and democracy and the recurring themes which sparked interest in the community.
