Refereed journal article or data article (A1)
Towards an Environmental History of Media? Water Pollution on Finnish Television Prior to Earth Day 1970
List of Authors: Laakkonen Simo, Tähkäpää Otto
Publisher: White Horse Press
Publication year: 2021
Journal: Environment and History
Journal name in source: ENVIRONMENT AND HISTORY
Journal acronym: ENVIRON HIST-UK
Volume number: 27
Issue number: 3
Start page: 367
End page: 398
eISSN: 1752-7023
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3197/096734019X15631846928693
URL: https://doi.org/10.3197/096734019X15631846928693
If we want to understand the historical expansion of environmental
awareness among the great public, then we must answer the questions, who
communicated what to whom and how? In addition to traditional print
media, television also presumably played a significant role in raising
environmental issues to public consciousness. And yet, surprisingly
enough, unlike with newspapers, empirical data about television is
almost completely lacking. We simply do not know when, where, why and
how television started to broadcast environmental news. Consequently our
case study can be considered an entrée into the qualitative study of
the environmental history of television. Our study focuses on Finnish
Broadcasting Company and we explore how water pollution and protection
issues were introduced on television to the Finnish public as a part of
the ‘long’ emergence of modern environmental awareness prior to the
Earth Day in 1970. The data sources consist of written content reports
collected from the database of the television archives as well as
digitised versions of original programme recordings. Relying on frame
analysis, the article explores the glory days of television, a time when
television network heads could expect that almost any programming would
attract the undivided attention of its audience in all industrialised
nations in the world.