The “floods of the century” in Valencia (Spain), which left more than 200 dead, and the resulting media coverage, make this initiative more relevant than ever: the Media Observatory on Ecology (OME ) will officially see the light of day on Thursday November 7, during a launch evening at the Théâtre de la Concorde, in Paris. The same day, a website will be put online so that the general public can follow the evolution of media treatment of environmental crises with quantified data – as a percentage of airtime – and qualified, i.e. 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 climate or environment-related crises. The most watched general 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 the television by the consortium. For radios, general stations with a national vocation (RTL, Europe 1, RMC and Sud Radio) and general public service radio stations (France Inter, Franceinfo, France Culture and RFI) were chosen to be put on the bench. 'essay.
This involves 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 which was formed in 2022 to call out the weak place of the ecological crisis in the media agenda.
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Beyond QuotaClimat, at 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 Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication joined the operation.
Coverage too low
Agreeing 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 the chosen methodology was presented to them in March. The OME will gather its data through a count that works using key words spoken on air.
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