Mediennutzung und Umweltbewusstsein: Dependenz- und Priming-Effekte

In a comparative perspective, the article is concerned with the contribution of media use to EU citizens’ levels of environmental knowledge and awareness. Mass media are the most important source for environmental information, and media use contributes considerably to the amount of information people hold on environmental issues. In addition, media use bears upon the perception of the burden to the environment, the worry about the state of the environment in one’s own country, and the worries about the environment in general. The explanatory power of media use is largest for those judgments that relate to the parts of the environment that cannot be directly experienced. Besides this result, which is in accordance to the dependency theory of media effects, the analysis corroborates a priming effect: The media affect judgments on the environmental burden one has to suffer and on the state of the environment even if these judgments can be based on one’s own perception. EU citizens, however, complain much less about the burden on their own environment than they worry about the state of the environment in general. This gap also, as is demonstrated, can be traced back, at least in part, to an influence of the media. Results for single EU countries partly differ from these general results, most likely due to differences in how much environmental issues are politicized in the media and how intensely they are covered.