The “floods of the century” in Valencia (Spain), which left more than 200 dead, and the subsequent media impact, make this initiative more relevant than ever: the Media Observatory of Ecology (OME) will officially see the light of day on Thursday November 7, during a presentation evening at the Théâtre de la Concorde, in Paris. On the same day, a website will be put online so that the general public can follow the evolution of the media treatment of environmental crises with quantified data – in percentage of broadcast time – and qualified, that is, classified into causes, consequences or solutions.
This observatory aims to measure the way in which eleven French television channels and nine radio stations report on crises related to the climate or the environment. The most watched generalist channels (TF1, France 2, France 3, M6, Arte and C8), as well as the continuous news channels (CNews, BFM-TV, LCI, Franceinfo, France 24), will be analyzed on television by the consortium. As for the radio stations, generalist stations with a national vocation (RTL, Europa 1, RMC and Sud Radio) and general public service radio stations (France Inter, Franceinfo, France Culture and RFI) were chosen for the test.
This means making available “unified, robust and expert data that can be used as a reference by the activist ecosystem but also by the media and public authorities”explains Eva Morel, co-founder of QuotaClimat, an association created in 2022 to denounce the weak place of the ecological crisis on the media agenda.
Beyond QuotaClimat, the origin of the project, the consortium is made up of several associations committed to environmental issues, such as Expertises Climat, Climat Médias, Data for Good, but also private technical partners such as Eleven and Mediatree. This initiative was the winner, in 2023, of a call for projects launched by the Environment and Energy Management Agency (Ademe), aimed at producing open source projects for the ecological transition. In February, the Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority joined the operation.
Too low coverage
Reaching an agreement on the methodology was one of the first obstacles to overcome for the observatory project to see the light of day. The selected media were consulted before presenting the chosen methodology in March. The OME will collect its data through a count that works from keywords spoken on air.
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