Media Release
13 October 2022
LAUNCH OF ANALYSIS OF MEDIA’S COVERAGE OF CLIMATE CHANGE DURING THE LGE2021
JOHANNESBURG, 13 October 2022 – In the past few years, the Climate Change issue has been at the center of the political debate globally. In South Africa the current energy crisis has amplified the debate with the main actors sometimes sending different messages on the issues or focusing only on certain parts of the topic. As a leading media research organisation in Africa, Media Monitoring Africa (MMA) thought it could be very fruitful to see how the Climate change topic was covered by media during the last local government elections in South Africa.
“The media has a major role to play in making sure that climate change also becomes an election topic and not only a conference theme”, said Jacques Ndong, Project coordinator at Media Monitoring Africa.
MMA conducted this media monitoring of climate change analysing mostly South African media
content from 01 July 2021 to 31 December 2021. This activity was conducted to find out who dominates coverage, their race, gender, and affiliation. MMA considers such kind of activity as paramount because it gives us a clear understanding of the sources dominating in the media coverage.
In the past years MMA has always conducted different research with a diversity of themes. However, the trends we observe are very often the same with males dominating the debate or politicians receiving more coverage compared to experts or NGO’s. The trends in this research are not quite different to what we observed before. The findings are presented in the following report that MMA is launching.
MMA will continue analysing these trends as we strongly believe that media have a responsibility to cover such topic as the climate crisis and an election period could be the best time to demonstrate if indeed climate change is an election issue.
We would like to invite citizens to read this report so that they can have a view on where exactly South Africa stands in term of climate change and whose voice we heard in the media.
To download the report please go to:
For further information, please contact:
Jacques Ndong, Media Monitoring Africa, jacquesn@mma.org.za, Tel: 011 788 1278
Lister Namumba, Media Monitoring Africa, listerr@mma.org.za, Tel: 011 788 1278
About MMA
Media Monitoring Africa‘s vision is a responsible, quality media that enables an engaged
and informed citizenry in Africa and across the world. MMA aims to promote the
development of a free, fair, ethical and critical media culture in South Africa and the rest of
the continent. To achieve MMA’s vision, the three key areas that MMA seeks to address
through a human rights-based approach are: media ethics, media quality and media
freedom.
For more information about MMA and its work for children visit www.mediamonitoringafrica.org