Responsibility Frames in Environmental Journalism

By Isaias Martinez October 1st, 2021

Jerolmack, in They Couldn’t Drink Their Water. And Still, They Stayed Quiet, writes a compelling narrative about a small town plagued by local fracking and how they suffered from these actions (Jerolmack, 2021). However, the people in the town were hesitant to pursue justice for their suffering. However, this article is significant when explaining the effects of framing and the assessment of risk. The situation in the story marks a relationship with risk and framing within the small community which led to the inevitable outcomes. An analysis of this framing is done to help and portray the situation while also analyzing whether or not this can be considered good journalism.

The article frames the risk of the community as low since it was only impacting 6 immediate families. This frame is also strengthened by the actions that the families chose to make, all but one of the families left the place. This story follows a specific framing that follows, “Responsibility frame was found to be the most prevalent frame followed by the Economic frame in their research. The prominence of the Responsibility frame shows the significance of political context in the framing of problems in the news” (Sudhan & Ramalingam, 2021). Following the ideas of framing by Wyss, journalist have taken notice of how they frame their ideas which is shown in this article (Wyss, 2019).  Using this idea of a responsibility frame, we can analyze that the corporations responsible for the fracking are the people who should be held accountable for the issues in the community. The story has a strong focus on response of the community towards the contaminated water and makes a point of vulnerability towards the families. In accordance with this point, the story can’t really be considered good journalism. The story’s main contribution is vulnerability which appeals to the reader’s emotions and challenges the ideas of balance and fairness in journalistic writing. The piece has an inherent bias towards the emotional connection to cause a pull at the heart strings.

Sources

Jerolmack, Colin. 2021, September 17, “They Couldn’t Drink Their Water. And Still, They Stayed Quiet” New York Times. Print

Sudhan M, M., & Ramalingam, S. (2021). A Study on the Framing of Climate Change Stories in Tamil Regional Newspapers. European Online Journal Of Natural And Social Sciences, 10(2), pp. 195-198. Retrieved from 

Wyss, Bob. Covering the environment: How journalists work the green beat. New York: Routledge, 2019. Print.