Materials

Forests have increasing unclear semantic boundaries and are an arena where a myriad of different disciplines converge and overlap, i.e., climate change, renewable energy, water, soil, nature protection, and rural development; thus, they can hardly be considered a sector but rather a space of interest (Rojas-Briales, 1995). Accordingly, the search had to cover a wide range of news, as forest-related news is found mostly among environmental issues, but it also appears in renewable energy sections, in economic sections, etc. The news items were found using keywords such as forest, bioenergy and biodiversity. Then, irrelevant news was deleted because sometimes the subject deviated from forests, for example, an article about truffles that focused mostly on the gastronomic angle.

The material analyzed had to be in a text format (can contain images), be accessible online and be available for some time in free accessible databases. Among the news media outlets that met these criteria, two newspapers were selected, El País and El Mundo, as the two most read daily newspapers in Spain (3 million readers combined), their availability in an online library for the last ten years or more, their wide political spectrum, and they are mainstream media (no specialized news media). The online versions of both newspapers combine all of the regional print editions, creating a more comprehensive collection of news and making it easier to compare between different regions.

Methods

Results for messages

A total of 1 065 news items in El Mundo and 815 news items in El País were recorded over the four-year period from 2009 to 2012, with most of the items being repeated in both newspapers (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. Number of news items by subject, by newspaper and year.

Forest news mentions several related terms (forests, forest management, harvesting, etc.). Traditional forest-related words, including “wood” (mentioned 54 times on average per year), and new terms, including “biomass” (mentioned 68 times on average per year), currently represent a small share of the terms used in forest-related news in Spain. Deforestation is closely linked to climate change, and thus it appears in many news items mainly focusing on climate change. Wood harvesting occupies a very small share of the news. Conversely, there are many news items where it is difficult to determine a main theme, as they are mixed and discuss several issues.

Wildfire-related news represented on average 65.6% (from 48 to 80%) of forest news, which leaves less than 100 news items per year dedicated to other forest-related news (Fig. 2). Wildfire news uses several key words (fires, flames, firemen, suppression, etc.). Wildfire-related news in both newspapers follows an ascending trend in absolute terms. However, in relative terms compared to other type’s news, it did not follow a clear trend.

Figure 2. Frequency of the most repeated words.

Forest wildfire news occurred entirely during the summer season in Spain (Fig. 3 and Fig. 4), as 85% of such news appeared during the months of July and August. One characteristic of wildfire news is that the same news item is presented for several days and appears in different ways. For example, two large forest fires that occurred in Cortes and Andilla (Valencia Region) and burned 45 000 ha in 2012 remained in the news for five days. Wildfires have been reported in the summer months for decades and are a gold mine for the media when there is a lack of other news. It has been common for journalists to cover this type of news without training or knowledge of the subject. Forest fires crucial period coincides with the core vacation period in Spain. The lack of news in that period might be a reason for an over proportionate attention that forest fires receive during that time. Disregarding the influence of forest fire-related news, there is an average of 25 other forest-related news items per month, which are spread out equally through the year and are not dependent on season.

Figure 3. Frequency of news items by subject by month.

Figure 4. Frequency of news items by subject and month in relative terms.

Forest wildfire news can be classified as (1) informative, with the institutional goal of informing the population on the level of fire risk, on dangerous weather conditions, etc.; (2) related to on-going fires, only discussing how the fire appeared, developed, or was extinguished; (3) related to incidents, such as accidents involving forest firefighters; or (4) analyzing the causes of forest fires from a scientific or/and technical point of view. The theme at the beginning of summer is on the resources (human and technical) put in place for the summer firefighting campaign, whereas at the end of the summer season, the theme is related mostly to describing the balance of the fire season.

The number of forest fire news items (Fig. 5) does not correlate with the number of fires during the year, the number of large fires (over 500 ha) or with the area burned. When they discuss ongoing fires or fires that have been extinguished, they always refer to the total hectares burned, which few readers are likely to understand in practical terms.

Figure 5. Forest fire statistics and forest fire news for the last four years.

The issues raised by forest professionals and other stakeholders are mostly related to the political preference for fire suppression resources instead of fire prevention resources.

Regarding bioenergy news items, they are linked to the renewable energy sector, interspersed with other types of energy, with virtually no ties to the forest sector. The main messages address creating rural employment, economic and business development, renewable energy, etc. The following are examples of news media reports on biomass as a renewable energy:

“…to produce a kWh with diesel costs € 8.89 cents while to produce one with pellets costs € 3.38 cents…”

“…if we use biomass, our forests will be under a lower risk of forest fires, and in case one starts, it will be easier to suppress and less costly…”

“…managing the richness of our forests, taking care, and generating jobs are the objectives of the biomass project…”

Most of the news related to the forest industry is nevertheless focused on the bioenergy sector, and only a few of them deal with traditional wood product activities. The primary forest industry in Spain, ENCE, is the only source of a large share of this news.

Messages regarding biodiversity and protected areas are focused on the preservation of plant and animal species and on the risks affecting their habitats. Some messages are mixed with themes of protected areas. Many of the biodiversity stories include water and agricultural issues as well. Many of these news items are based on scientific findings with the sources being universities, research centers, etc.

Climate change is a universal subject that appears in many other types of news items, including some related to biodiversity and some related to forest fires, but few of these clearly address the relationship between climate change and forests and forestry itself.

After-fire reforestation tends always to be presented as a fight for numbers, either for hectares or number of trees. These items are concentrated in the months of October and November.

In order to examine the way that different news items are presented by both newspapers, some “style parameters” were analyzed. Forty-eight percent of the news items in El Mundo include a photo, and 8% include a video, while El País includes photos in 48% of items and videos in 10%. In both newspapers, the photos and videos are mostly linked to wildfires, and consequently, they appear mostly during the summer. Photos of fauna are also prevalent. The main difference between both newspapers is that El Mundo uses more maps to illustrate the locations of forest fires.

The average length of a news item is 598 words, with El País having slightly longer items than El Mundo. Forest wildfire news items are the shortest (on average 422 words), mostly because many of them are just brief informative notes on the evolution of the fires.

Findings show that variations in tone and language significantly impact public attitudes about relevant policy actions (Cockerill, 2003); therefore, the positivity, negativity or neutrality of the headlines was recorded. The results for this parameter show (Table 2) that wildfires are most often presented as negative, while the rest of the news items are quite evenly distributed among these three categories. The differences between the two newspapers are not significant; however, El Mundo presents wildfires with an even more negative view, while the remaining forest-related news is skewed towards a more positive view.

News media coverage of wildfires and other natural disasters often focuses on immediate and dramatic events, rather than on the broader context in which they occur (Smith, 1992). Forest fires represent 65.6% of the forest-related news in Spain. These stories are treated as emergencies, but they are a consequence of many of the management strategies employed in Mediterranean forests. In fact, to emphasize the dramatic nature of the news, terms such as devastate, threaten, destroy, danger, and damage are frequently used with negative headlines.

Spain is a country with contrasting types of nature in different regions due to historical, geographical and social factors. The news items were classified according to geographical area: international (5.5% El País, 16.1% El Mundo), national (Spain) (16.9% El País, 6.7% El Mundo) and regional (77.6% El País, 77.2% El Mundo). The international stories centered on large forest fires in Greece (2009) and Russia (2010) and on the new forest legislation concerning deforestation in Brazil (2011).

Within Spain, the most highly represented region in the El País newspaper is Galicia (32.3%), and the second is Catalunya (13.8%), while the most represented Spanish regions in El Mundo are Comunitat Valenciana (23%) and Galicia (18.3%). The statistics show that during the period 2009-2012, 25% of the forest fires > 1 ha, while representing only 10% of the total burned area, occurred in the region of Galicia (Ministerio de Agricultura, Alimentación y Medio Ambiente, 2012).

Not considering the news related to forest fires, in El País, Galicia has the highest number of news, and Andalucia has the second most; in El Mundo, the most represented region is Castilla y Leon, and the second most represented is Comunitat Valenciana. This could be correlated with the higher number of readers for each of the newspapers in the different regions.

Discussion on materials and methods

The market penetration share of the primary Spanish mass media platforms (AIMC, 2014) is as follows: television 88.6%, radio 61%, magazines 41%, Internet 60.7% (54% of people search for today’s news), and newspapers 37.6%. Has to be noted that Internet penetration is up from 41.5% in the data research three years earlier (AIMC, 2011). Therefore, one limitation of this research is that the analysis of online newspapers does not cover the most influential platform for mass media in the country, which is television, but is either not so far in market share. Each media platform has its own style, and some research (Sheppard & Bawden, 1997) states that more in-depth information, in terms of context, commentary and analysis, is available from newspapers than from television.

In the USA, the Forest Service has a permanent unit that analyzes forest-related news from the database CyberAlert, an online news clipping service that obtains news articles about the Forest Service from over 25 000 news sources across the country. This database searches a wide range of sources that are available online, including major national and regional newspapers and television. Unfortunately, in Spain, such databases or services do not exist; furthermore, the large newspapers have only made their news items available online in the last few years. This makes the analysis much more manual and, consequently, slow, costly and more susceptible to bias.

Discussion of the messages

Wildfires clearly dominate the news and thus the discussion in Spain. This is magnified because in the past, they only made the news when a vast area was affected, but presently, any attempted arson is covered immediately. In addition, the visibility of fires and the accessibility to burned areas might play an important role. Discussions are focused mostly on firefighting or on the direct cause of the fire and have a lesser focus on prevention. Causes of the fire problem are a small fraction of total wildfire-related coverage. Rarely is it presented any linkage with climate change for example. Otherwise, media discussions of forest fire prevention policies follow the pattern of firefighting discussions.

Most of the media are pressured to either downplay problems in the environment or to cover them dramatically (Cox, 2006). Forest fires is the single issue that brings public attention high into the social and political agenda. The anxiety that it generates due to the impossibility to control them over a given period of time might be a reason for that as well as their very impacting visibility. As a result, forest fires have become sensationalist press, often influenced by the most radical ENGOs, opposition political parties, etc., who receive political advantage by discrediting the current government.

Firefighting operations are expensive and difficult to maintain; however, they are preserved because they are observed as politically necessity, as otherwise citizens believe that the authorities do nothing to combat fires. In this regard, mass media conditions public opinion, which shapes policy decision making, creating a negative feedback loop.

Forest managers may want to consider working to ensure that prevention policy issues are highlighted throughout the year because research on other natural hazards has found that information provided during the “window of opportunity” is more likely to have a positive response when people are already aware of the problem and possible solutions (Monroe et al., 2005).

Media give little space to less visible problems (biodiversity, etc.), and they are not highlighting enough important issues, such as climate change, fossil energy substitution (biomass), and rural employment, perhaps due to their complexity. In many parts of Spain, the structural problem of finding sustainable ways of managing forests economically, socially and environmentally is complex and still unresolved. There are many forests without management, where biomass accumulates and increases fire risk. The modernization of Spanish society changed forest uses and representations from those of the traditional agrarian societies more than 60 years ago.

Wildfires are seen in general from a negative perspective; coherently the messages about them are negative as well. However, a method need be found to disassociate wildfires with the view of forests in general, otherwise the negative image spreads across the forest sector, and the result is that forests themselves are regarded as negative for society because of the risk of wildfires. Wildfires need therefore to be treated clearly as natural risks and emergency issues. Conversely, the remaining messages should be more strongly positive, and there are sound reasons for this. During these years of financial crisis and extremely high unemployment in Spain, a sector that creates employment at a high rate by unit of investment (e.g., bioenergy) need be more visible in mass media and give very positive messages.

An imbalance between the quantity of news items and their themes in different parts of Spain is found, in parallel with the fact that forests and forestry differ greatly from one region to another. Hence, mass media and public opinion should be monitored and analyzed region by region because they cannot be interpreted from the average results for the entire country. Public forest services, legislation, subsidies, they are all organized at the regional level, and thus it does the public debate.

Discussion of the sources

Forestry in Spain certainly doesn’t have economic relevance, except for the northwestern region, and consequently, there is a weak forest stakeholder network, which is reflected by its low presence in mass media. Despite this, there has more recently been an increase in both forest owners and professional associations at the national and regional level, which could have generated a greater volume of news in the form of communication flows. However, these associations are not playing an influential role in mass media and only have a few mentions, slightly less than the share of the ENGOs. In some regions, forest platforms have been recently organized in order to give more visibility to the sector by presenting a single representative voice to be heard in representation.

As official sources contribute to over 50% of news items, journalists must be relying on their press releases, not questioning and contrasting their statements with other professional sources. This is partly because, regrettably, often the same journalist is reporting on such different themes, such as pine nuts and the harvesting of renewable energies, and consequently, the discussion loses quality.