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Environmental Reporting in Ukrainian Media: The Importance of Communicating Environmental Science to Raise Public Environmental Awareness

Journalism Research, volume 5, issue 3 (2022), pp. 253-269
"The research findings suggest that disaster and entertainment journalism currently may not contribute much to the audience’s awareness and commitment to ecology. Current coverage of environmental issues in Ukrainian news media as perceived by survey respondents reveals that news media may divert public attention away from real environmental problems, while those that threaten large-scale and often irreversible consequences are only seen to be taking second place. Respondents mainly received media texts of limited value, which did not provide comprehensive information, so they may have prevented an adequate understanding of complex environmental processes, phenomena, and events. Therefore, it is time to change the current situation. This study suggests that serious changes should be made in news media coverage of environmental issues in Ukraine. An important step in this context is to increase environmental science communication in Ukrainian news media, which means improving the scientific level of environmental content, providing the public with scientifically correct, reliable, relevant, evidence-based, and socially important information based on scientific findings and data." (Conclusion)