Towards an Environmental History of Television. Water Pollution Issues on Finnish Broadcasting Prior to Earth Day 1970

Abstract

If we want to understand the historical expansion of environmental awareness among the great public, then we must answer the questions, who communicated what to whom and how? In addition to traditional print media, television also presumably played a significant role in raising environmental issues to public consciousness. And yet, surprisingly enough, unlike with newspapers, empirical data about television is almost completely lacking. We simply do not know when, where, why and how television started to broadcast environmental news. Consequently our case study can be considered an entrée into the qualitative study of the environmental history of television. Our study focuses on Finnish Broadcasting Company and we explore how water pollution and protection issues were introduced on television to the Finnish public as a part of the 'long' emergence of modern environmental awareness prior to the Earth Day in 1970. The data sources consist of written content reports collected from the database of the television archives as well as digitised versions of original programme recordings. Relying on frame analysis, the article explores the glory days of television, a time when television network heads could expect that almost any programming would attract the undivided attention of its audience in all industrialised nations in the world.