The Media and Environmental Safety: a Comparative Analysis of the Coverage of Environmental Safety Between the Nation and Standard Newpapers in the Year 2009

Abstract

The project surveys the role that the Nation and Standard newspapers play to sensitize the Kenyan public on issues of environmental safety. It endeavors to establish the preferences of . various readers in terms of the articles choice and the impact that the two newspapers have had on the practicing of Kenyan readers to observing environmental safety. Critically the study looks at the prominence given by the two mainstream print media in reporting on environmental issues by looking at the perception they have had on the Kenyan public. The methodologies used in the study are content analysis and a survey on sampled respondents (from Nakuru Municipality) and the findings derived from them, analyzed to represent the opinions of the wider citizenry.

The study aims to achieve five fundamental goals; to ascertain whether political reporting in print media supersedes other news reports, to show if the two print media prioritize environmental reporting as an aspect of national concern, to compare which media between Nation and Standard dedicates more space to promotion of environmental safety, to establish the extent to which the two newspapers influence the public on environmental issues and to find out the impact the two print media have had on the Kenyan public practice on environmental safety. The study will also serve as a body of literature for future studies on the same or related research pursuits.