Solutions Journalism in Wildfire Coverage
I felt like I was surrounded by wildfire during my junior year — I took classes on it, wrote about it for Ethos and took an interest in forest policy outside of school. I then started the Honors Program at UO's School of Journalism and Communication and suddenly had to figure out a thesis topic. Parallel to my belief that journalism is advocacy, I think that journalists should highlight solutions, not only problems, to create positive, just change. As such, I examined Pacific Northwest wildfire coverage, and whether newspapers discussed solutions to these historically mismanaged events, for my thesis.
There's a rich history of Indigenous burning in the Pacific Northwest, and many ecosystems across the region would readily benefit from more prescribed fire, or fire intentionally put onto the landscape to mitigate future catastrophic burns. At its inception, though, the United States Forest Service sought to snuff out all fire, even healthy ones. Eventually, the USFS and Western Science recognized that wildfire suppression increased the amount of burnable fuels within American forests, paradoxically causing more severe wildfires.
Research supports that wildfire media coverage tends to fixate on immediate risk and short-term developments: evacuation routes, containment efforts and so on. Now an empirically supported solution, I wanted to understand whether the two largest newspapers in Idaho, Oregon and Washington framed prescribed fire this way. I analyzed the content of articles published from 2010 to 2023, and here's what I found.
Out of 607 articles, the practice of prescribed fire is mentioned in 64 articles (10.5%) about wildfire events and referenced more than once in just 20 articles (3.3%). Disconnected from specific wildfire events, however, Pacific Northwest newspapers mentioned prescribed fire in 101 articles and framed it as a solution in 61 of those articles. Read my full thesis and why providing solutions is part of a journalist's responsibility below, or on UO's Scholars' Bank website.