Ecolinguistics for and beyond the Sustainable Development Goals

2.1 Basic human needs

When humans were first learning to farm, around 8000 BC, a total of approximately five million people inhabited the Earth; yet, in 2023, the human population may reach eight billion (Worldometer 2020). Approximately, 144 million people are born every year and approximately 57 million people die (Ritchie 2019). Many of these 57 million may be dying unnecessarily, because despite the great progress that science has made in finding ways to provide humans with food, clean water, and sanitation, many people still die from lack of these basic human needs (United Nations 2016).

For instance, undernutrition causes an estimated 3.1 million child deaths annually, that is, more than 8,000 daily (World Hunger Education Service 2020). It is another sad reality that the overlapping factors of absence of sanitation facilities and clean water kill 100s of thousands of children before they reach the age of five (World Health Organization 2019). The United Nations estimated that more than 50% of the world’s population does not have access to safely managed sanitation (Harvey 2020a). Furthermore, as hand washing with soap and water is believed to be a key defense against the COVID-19 pandemic and other viruses, the absence of clean water puts the poor at greater risk from viruses. UNICEF (2019) reported that globally, one in eight health care facilities were without water service, and one in five had to cope without sanitation service. The poor also have suffered disproportionately from COVID-19 due to the huge disparity in access to vaccines (Tatar et al. 2021).

The UN SDGs were formulated in 2015. The 17 SDGs replaced the Millennium Development Goals which were initiated in 2000 (United Nations Development Program 2020). Of particular interest for this article are SDGs 1 (no poverty), 2 (zero hunger), 3 (good health and well-being), and 6 (clean water and sanitation). Prior to the start of the current study, we had anecdotally noticed that little seemed to be reported in the media concerning deaths caused by inadequate access to food, water, and sanitation. Deaths and infections caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, on the other hand, appeared to be receiving far greater media attention at the time when the data were collected for this study: late 2019 and early 2020. We wondered why we saw so little in the media about deaths caused by hunger and lack of clean water and sanitation, while other causes of death captured headlines. This study sought to bring the light and credibility of research to bear on whether our impressions were correct and, if they were, to investigate why this imbalanced situation came to exist.

2.2 Media selected attention

Many areas of scholarship can be drawn upon to suggest reasons for the much greater attention to deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic compared to attention to deaths caused by inadequate access to food, water, and sanitation. This section of the article briefly addresses some of these often overlapping reasons.

First, in economics, the concept of supply and demand is well-known. However, just because people want a product or service, such as food or the construction of a sanitation system, that does not count as a demand unless they are able to purchase the necessary products or services, that is, unless they have effective demand. People who have no difficulty exercising effective demand may not appreciate the struggle of those without the financial wherewithal to buy necessities. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic, even wealthy people, those who can afford media access are vulnerable. Each one is a potential victim.

In addition to economics, psychology is a field that may offer insights as to why some causes of death draw more media attention than do others. For example, psychologists talk about the recency effect (Ebbinghaus 1913) in which more recent phenomena attract more attention. Certainly, the COVID-19 pandemic, which contains the number ‘19’ due to its rise to prominence in November/December 2019, is much more recent a cause of death than hunger and lack of clean water and sanitation. Psychologists have also discussed a tendency for humans to feel a closer connection to people who are more similar (Seidman 2018) or to those who experience similar phenomena with themselves, that is, a closeness effect. Closeness effect links with the concept of circle of compassion. This could also be interpreted in terms of people’s tendency to restrict their circle of compassion to those whom they know, those who are close to them both physically as well as in terms of similarities (e.g. nationality and social class), that is, only those close to their lives receive their attention. Perhaps, we can expand our circle of compassion to all people, including those who are suffering from hunger and from access to clean water and sanitation, as well as those affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Political science may also provide clues as to why some deaths receive more media attention than others. Herman and Chomsky (2010) introduced the terms worthy victims and unworthy victims, with worthy victims, deemed to be deserving of people’s attention and sympathy, whereas the deaths of unworthy victims, for whatever reasons they die, do not merit much notice in the media. Of course, worthiness depends on who is judging. For example, Pear (2018) criticized a US government perspective by recounting that the US representative to the United Nations held up photos of Syrian children who had been killed by the armed forces of the Syrian government, a government opposed by the US government. At the same time, Pear claimed that the US largely ignored the deaths of 50,000 Yemeni children, as these deaths resulted in part from policies of a US government ally, the government of Saudi Arabia. Perhaps, for many in the media, victims of the COVID-19 pandemic may somehow be more worthy than victims of malnutrition or lack of clean water and sanitation.

Writing on the issue of world hunger, Field (2002: Para. 8–9) also offered a political science perspective on the distribution of attentional resources, writing that

One might think that hunger would be an easy issue for governments, international agencies, and even universities to embrace. Nobody actually favors the existence of hunger, except occasionally as a weapon of war. Most would agree that hunger is undesirable and that its prevalence in the world connotes something wrong that should be addressed. And, indeed, leaders as diverse as Lenin, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ferdinand Marcos have exploited the rhetorical appeal of hunger as an issue, confident that it symbolizes what they oppose and that their people’s ethical, humanitarian, and political beliefs will reward them for pledging to rectify the situation. (Field 2002: Para. 8–9)

Despite hunger’s seemingly easy appeal to politicians, government and NGO staff, and well as the media, as an issue that casts those addressing it in a positive light, Field noted some reasons that hunger does not receive the media space that it might otherwise seem to merit. These reasons include:

1. Hungry people often lack visibility, living in remote areas or, when situated in urban areas, residing in locations not often frequented by media consumers.

2. The hungry often suffer from an absence of what Field called ‘political salience’, that is, they do not know how to make their voices heard.

3. While almost everyone agrees that people being without sufficient food and going without water and sanitation is a societal evil, fewer people agree that addressing this evil results in a collective good.

In the field of Mass Communication, Framing Theory (Entman 1993; Stibbe 2015) suggests that how the media frames or presents situations or events has an important impact on media consumers’ views and actions. Kogen (2014) found that news articles in US newspapers that covered the issue of hunger in the United States usually framed the problem as an important public matter, with the victims presented as being worthy of political action on their behalf, and the US government and readers being presented as having agency to reduce or end hunger in their own country. In contrast, Kogen (2014) found that articles in the same US newspapers covering hunger in Africa framed hunger there as less relevant to the US public, and focused less on the victims being viewed as worthy of assistance and of the problem being solvable, rendering readers as impotent, either to solve the problem themselves or to influence their government to solve the problem. Thus, framing may be key to reader reactions.

An example of media framing of an issue as one in which victims are worthy of assistance and in which readers are capable of rendering some assistance can be seen in a Singapore newspaper article from early 2020 (Co 2020). In that article, readers were called on to help those in need due to the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. This assistance effort was painted in a positive light in quoted comments by government ministers, and the effort was described by the use of such terms from Singapore culture as kampung (‘community’) and sayang (‘caring’). Furthermore, specific guidance was given on what readers could do to assist.

Inclusion/exclusion of solutions-oriented information needs to be considered, since crises represent a key time during which the potential for international engagement is discussed in the mainstream media. However, Kogen (2014) found that US newspapers, when reporting on suffering in Africa tended to imply that no solutions were available or that suggested solutions were unrealistic. Nevertheless, Kogen did maintain that media coverage plays an important role by informing citizens, so that they can shape and express views on what their government and other organizations are doing.

2.3 The influence of the media

Before turning to the study, it might be useful to recall a belief held by communication researchers and discourse analysts concerning the influence of media coverage on public beliefs and attitudes: The press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about” (Cohen 1963: 13). The link between media attention and public opinions has indeed been a focus of investigations for many years. Citing Boomgaarden and Vliegenthart (2009), Kellstedt (2000), Tukachinsky (2015), and Bleich et al. (2021) pointed out how media coverage can influence people’s conceptions of their own status and place in society and affect people’s preferences as to public policies towards different groups. In other words, what the media focus on can have an important impact on media consumers’ views and actions and drive public perception, attitudes, and possibly behavior (Bleich et al. 2021; Entman 1993; Kogen 2014).

While much of past research has focused on media bias towards certain groups of people (Baker et al. 2013; Bleich et al. 2021; Blinder and Allen 2016), the study to be reported in this article seeks to uncover the relative media attention to issues that have for millennia been fundamentally important to human survival (specifically, food, clean water, and sanitation) versus the media’s attention to the COVID-19 pandemic. The motivation for this study began with our disappointment at the continuation of the suffering of children and others when solutions seem to be so easily achieved. For example, undernutrition continues while huge amounts of food – more than enough to feed all the world’s hungry people – are fed to farmed animals, so that these nonhuman animals can live lives far short of their natural life expectancies before being slaughtered to provide meat to those who can afford to purchase it (Smithers 2017).

Similarly, we had been wondering why there is impressionistically so little attention in the media given to deaths caused by hunger and lack of clean water and sanitation, while other causes of death capture headlines. This seemingly unbalanced media coverage became particularly obvious in March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic dominated the news. Using the present illustrative study, this article seeks to contribute to the wider conversation concerning the role of media in shaping the public’s views and actions on issues that are at the heart of human sustainable development which, in turn, highlights how ecolinguists can be more socially engaged and make a contribution to achieving the SDGs, the focus of the second part of the article.

3.1 Research questions

This study aims to address two questions:

1. What is the relative balance of media attention to the problems, on one hand, of extreme scarcity of food and lack of clean water and sanitation, and on the other hand, of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak?

2. What are possible explanations for that (im)balance?

3.2 Materials

Four corpora were developed, comprising online articles from four newspapers from the period of November 1, 2019 to March 31, 2020. These newspaper articles were then examined for mentions of either extreme scarcity of food, clean water, and sanitation or the COVID-19 pandemic. The second question was addressed via a literature review and by sending a draft of the current article, along with the results of the first research question, to people in the media, in media studies, in the NGO sector, and in related areas, and asking them for their responses.

For the first research question, media attention was operationalized in this study by examining the number of newspaper articles with a focus on the issues: critically inadequate access to food, water, and sanitation versus the COVID-19 pandemic. Four corpora, representing four well-established English language newspapers in Malaysia (The New Straits Times), Singapore (The Straits Times), the UK (The Guardian), and the US (The New York Times), were created in order to examine newspaper coverage of the relevant issues.

To collect articles from the four newspapers, a web crawler program was developed based on the PySpider, a spider system in Python. From the four different newspaper websites as target pages, over 35,000 non-duplicate articles were collected. The articles were all from the “Local/National News” section and the “World News” section of the online versions of the newspapers published in the period of November 1, 2019 to March 31, 2020.

All of the articles were then stored in separate folders according to the respective newspaper and time period. As can be seen from Table 1, the four corpora comprised 35,162 articles of 26.7 million words (tokens) in total, including 8,740 the New Straits Times articles (24.86%), 7,890 The Straits Times articles (22.44%), 12,853 The Guardian articles (36.56%), and 5,679 The New York Times articles (16.15%). Changes of coverage over the five months were also noted. There were 6,172 or 17.55% articles in November 2019, 5,850 or 16.63% in December 2019, 6,596 or 18.76% in January 2020, 7,600 or 21.61% in February 2020, and 8,944 or 25.44% in March 2020.

With the help of the regular expressions package in Python, the newspaper articles with words and phrases associated with extreme scarcity of food, clean water, and sanitation or COVID-19 pandemic in the title or in the text were identified. It is important to note that there is no uniform method to select words related to the issues we were interested in and that there was undeniably a degree of subjectivity in generating the relevant search terms (see also Bleich et al. 2021). That said, prior to the automatic search, a close study of a random selection of the articles in the corpora was done to identify words and phrases that seemed to regularly occur in articles reporting the issues we were investigating. Words like undernutrition were initially identified and became the word choice for an automatic search in the corpus of newspapers. A further close study of random individual texts suggested the need to also consider spelling variants such as under-nutrition and synonyms such as malnutrition.

The resulting list of search items for the automatic identification of the relevant articles based on this interactive process was as follows:

Extreme scarcity of food, clean water, and sanitation: under-nutrition, undernutrition, under nutrition, malnutrition, undernourished, hunger, starvation, famine, clean water, sanitation

COVID-19 pandemic: corona virus, coronavirus, COVID-19, COVID 19, COVID19, Wuhan virus, China virus, Chinese virus ^[1]

A total of 9,425 (26.80%) articles that contained these search items were identified. Next, those articles were divided into three categories: Category 1 – severe inadequacy of food, water, and sanitation; Category 2 – COVID-19 pandemic; and Category 3 – articles containing mention of both severe shortage of food, clean water, and sanitation, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

It must also be noted that the kind of scarcity of food, water, and sanitation considered in this study is the kind of extreme scarcity which for years and years has regularly led to millions of deaths, years before the world became aware of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Because the search items, especially for Categories 1 and 3, could have different meanings or interpretations in different contexts in the newspaper articles, the articles with mentions of the extreme scarcity issues in this study were further studied to improve accurate identification of the articles. For example, using the search item hunger, we found not only articles reporting on issues of scarcity of food but also articles about the Hunger Games and about a hunger strike. Articles with such irrelevant terms were excluded from our analysis. Thus, all the articles in Categories 1 and 3 were cross-checked by the authors. First, the authors met by Zoom to discuss a selection of about 20 sample articles. Then, the first and third authors separately rated ten articles. Their ratings matched on 100% of the articles. Next, the third author rated all the remaining articles to see if they seemed to truly belong to Categories 1 and 3. This close analysis resulted in the total number of articles changing to 9,175 (26.09%).

To explore Research Question 2, after the results for Research Question 1 were available, about 30 professionals working in journalism and media studies were contacted for their feedback. They were from Malaysia, Singapore, Spain, the Philippines, the UK, and the US, with the researchers relying on their academic connections and their knowledge of the industries relevant to the study. Also, journalists from the four newspapers were contacted. All the professionals were asked to comment, however briefly, on why the COVID-19 pandemic received so much more media attention than extreme scarcity of food, clean water and sanitation. It might be important to note that at the time they were contacted (mid- to late April, 2020), COVID-19 pandemic had yet to cause as many deaths as the scarcity problems cause on a regular basis, not to mention that scarcity had been causing millions of fatality for years.

4.1 Research question 1: The balance of media attention

Research Question 1 asked: What is the relative balance of media attention to the problems, on the one hand, of extreme scarcity of food and lack of clean water and sanitation, and on the other hand, of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak?

Table 2 shows the results of the distribution of articles in the following three categories: Category 1 – Articles focusing on extreme scarcity of food, water and sanitation; Category 2 – Articles focusing on COVID-19 pandemic; and Category 3 – Articles focusing on both the extreme scarcity of food, water and sanitation, and COVID-19 pandemic.

As can be seen from Table 2, of the 35,162 articles in the corpus of articles from the four online publications, 9,175 articles (26.09%) were relevant to Research Question 1. Of those articles, 45 (0.49%) were judged by the researchers to fit into Category 1, 9,109 articles (99.28%) were placed in Category 2, and 21 articles (0.23%) were placed in Category 3. Possible reasons for this distribution of articles into the three categories were the focus of Research Question 2.

4.2 Research question 2: Explanations for the imbalance

Research Question 2 asked: What are possible explanations for the imbalance in media attention to the problems, on the one hand, of extreme scarcity of food and lack of clean water and sanitation, and on the other hand, of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak? Insights into media practice were gained through the feedback from those teaching media and communication studies and those working in the media industry. It must be noted though that of the approximately 30 professionals who were contacted for their expert views, only eight responded. Responses which added to what was learned via the literature review appear below anonymously:

1. The COVID-19 pandemic captures media attention because of its novelty as an unseen, unprecedented, wide-scale phenomenon that has baffled the world’s top scientists. This is somewhat similar to the recency effect in psychology, mentioned above.

2. However, as to the novelty effect bringing media attention to the COVID-19 pandemic, one respondent pointed out that zoonotic diseases (diseases spread between humans and other animals) were actually not novel, as they go back thousands of years and may be expanding due to humans increasing encroachment on the lives of other animals (Greger 2020; Spinney 2020).

3. Furthermore, although warnings about upcoming pandemics from luminaries such as Bill Gates were not new, the media’s short attention span means that the media tend to focus on problems only when those problems manifest themselves as disasters. Similar criticisms have been made regarding media attention to the climate crisis (Moore 2009).

4. The COVID-19 pandemic may have a short-term solution, such as a vaccine or a treatment, whereas extreme poverty can only be addressed via long-term solutions, and as noted above, the media have a short attention span.

5. One axiom about media coverage is, ‘If it bleeds, it leads’. That is, phenomena receive front-page coverage (they lead) when they have a large negative impact (they bleed). Although the COVID-19 pandemic crisis has not produced bloody photos, there has been no shortage of striking photos of the pandemic’s impact, for example, supermarket shelves emptied by panic buying, normally crowded cityscapes suddenly devoid of people, clear skies and waterways normally darkened by pollution, and people in hospital beds connected to multitudes of machines and surrounded by hospital staff covered from head to toe with multiple levels of protection). Such juicy stories bring online clicks and increased readership, thereby growing revenue for the media.

6. The COVID-19 pandemic also gained media attention due to the racial and geopolitical elements. As the virus is thought by some to have begun in China, Chinese-looking people, regardless of nationality, were sometimes targeted.

7. The COVID-19 pandemic brought with it other political issues, such as whether or not to lockdown and for how long to lockdown. Later, after the data for this study had been collected, other issues arose such as whether to mandate vaccinations. Politicians used the media to seek support for their views on these issues.

8. As governments needed to involve the public in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, the media were key tools for informing and mobilizing the public, including in combatting and promoting fake news. Of course, although this seems to seldom take place, governments could also attempt to mobilize public involvement in addressing the overlapping crises arising from lack of food, clean water, and sanitation. Indeed, the United Nations and others seek to use the media in their campaigns around the SDGs.

9. Some media coverage has linked the COVID-19 pandemic with SDG 2, Zero Hunger (e.g. Godin 2020). However, the fact that our data showed few articles in Category 3 (i.e. articles on both the COVID-19 pandemic and on fatal effects of poverty) suggests that these newspapers may reflect and reinforce a common tendency among too many people to think in isolated, fragmented units of analysis while failing to conceptualize and communicate the inter-connectedness of events and conditions (Nguyen and Bosch 2014).

10. The inequitable distribution of food, clean water and sanitation across the world’s populations is too political (hot) for media to comment upon, too much for consumers of media to absorb, and seemingly insurmountable given the general lack of political and social will to do anything to even see the problem, let alone talk about strategies to fix it.

All these issues suggest that more research be done. Replication can be a powerful way forward. Porte (2012) and Zwaan et al. (2018), for example, suggested that being able to repeat a study and obtain similar results plays a vital role in the credibility of science. For instance, psychology, in particular, has had the quality of findings questioned due to inability of others to consistently repeat the findings of their research. Another benefit of replication involves the development of research methodologies, as different researchers using varied methods in varied contexts may open scholars’ eyes to new possibilities and may raise questions about research paradigms. In addition to attempting to replicate previous studies as exactly as possible, language researchers can also do conceptual replications, which diverge from original studies. For example, in the case of the study reported in this article, variations to be used in possible replications include the languages, media, news topics, discussion of data collection and analysis methods, countries involved, and other SDGs (see, e.g. Bednarek 2016; Chouliaraki and Stolic 2017; Partington 2010; Tagg and Seargeant 2021; Taylor 2010). Also, a comparison between the number of articles in the ‘Local/National news section’ and the World News section’ might offer more insights into relative media attention to local versus global issues.