Abstract

This thesis positions the idea of ‘cultural emissions’ as a means for starting to identify and measure the potential impacts of all news-media output over time in relation to ‘sustainability’. The reason for doing this is the potentially huge, unmeasured impacts these cultural emissions may have and how this may be negatively affecting global efforts to achieve sustainability goals. Current approaches term the effects of this output ‘brainprint’, but the literature largely comes from industry and has weak links to theory, and indeed, sustainability theories. Combining notions of ‘emissions’ from environmental science, in this case meaning content or output, with brainprint, the effects of such output, aims to simplify the fearsome challenge of measurement.

The literature review suggests that all of these cultural emissions are likely influencing how markets, societies and ultimately people behave in relation to sustainability. It also raises questions about ‘responsibility’ and ‘accountability’, and highlights this may be impacting the ‘trust’ of audiences when confusing messages collide. Other studies focus on ‘editorial’ and ‘environmental’ content alone, missing key cultural emissions categories. This study has therefore developed and tested a content analysis instrument for measuring cultural emissions over time, across publishers, time periods and types of output, crucially including both editorial and ‘advertising’, which are too often taken as separate by content analysts and industry researchers alike. This instrument uses a ‘space score’ that extends existing approaches to help measure different kinds of output more quickly. It also offers a ‘sustainability score’ where items can be quickly judged to be ‘safe, just and equitable’.

The findings suggest the media industry’s sustainability focus must move from efforts around ‘climate reporting' and environmental campaigns to include ‘background’ content, such as political, economics and lifestyle ‘topics’, and both advertising and editorial. Motoring, for example, was the single largest ‘subtopic’ of all advertising, even though Transport was not the largest overall advertising topic category. The largest advertiser captured in the sample, across both titles, was Volkswagen, during the 2015 emissions scandal. Motoring is the most polluting category according to advertising industry data. There have also been considerable editorial sections dedicated to this sector, as well as to the wider economy, and unlike the environment.

A theoretical contribution of this thesis is to show that the industry approach and media theory of ‘social responsibility’ that has informed much recent research may in fact be at odds with sustainability. A further theoretical contribution attempts to show the systemic, cyclical nature of brainprint, and how this may interact with the ‘values’ prioritised in our ‘cultural commons’.

Implications of this research suggest the news media is not being held accountable for ‘material’ impacts on the ‘natural world’ and ‘social world’, instead it prioritises legal-financial and then editorial concerns. The thesis concludes that more work must be done to understand the values that inform media content, how these appear, and the outcomes and impacts this may have for ensuring a 'safe, just and equitable' world.