ABSTRACT
In 2013, the American public ranked climate change at the very bottom of 21 policy issues that they believed the President and Congress should deal with; another poll found that 2013 represented the lowest year for environmental concern since polling on the topic had begun over 20 years ago (Globescan, 2013; Pew Research Center, 2013). Television is an important influence on the development of attitude, and given the context of apparent indifference toward environmental issues, it is prudent to revisit research into portrayals of the environment on American commercial/entertainment television. Does what television says about the environment have anything to do with what we think about its problems and solutions? This article reviews a research program that began in the 1990s (see McComas, Shanahan and Butler, 2001; Shanahan, 1996; Shanahan and McComas, 1997) that has been revisited only sporadically. The research was conceptualized in the late 1980s and reached a first period of fruition in the mid 1990s, as an extension of the Cultural Indicators project, which itself began in the 1960s. The Cultural Indicators project gathers data on how television represents the world, and uses “cultivation theory” to explore television’s impacts on public perceptions (Morgan, Shanahan and Signorielli, 2009). Cultivation theory essentially states that heavier viewers of television will be more likely to hold conceptions of the world that are consistent with TV portrayals than lighter viewers (Besley and Shanahan, 2004; Good, 2009; Morgan and Shanahan, 2010). In revisiting and revising the work on environmental issues from a Cultural Indicators perspective, we first review the original findings and then discuss some new findings about cultivation theory and media attention in relation to the environment.
