Environmentally Sound Agriculture Between Transformation and Conformation: The Changing Portrayal of the Growing Organic Farming Movement in Austria's Newspaper Coverage

ABSTRACT

Possible contributions of organic farming to solve the current environmental crisis in industrialized agriculture can range from greening the existing agrofood system to being a driver for systemic change. The growth of organic farming has led to debates over whether organic is still a driver of societal transformation or whether it has become a slightly greener version of conventional agriculture. We investigate the changing roles that are ascribed to the growing organic farming movement by societal communication processes in the context of transformations towards more sustainable food systems. We analyze how organic is portrayed in six Austrian newspapers during its time of growth (1990–1999) and in more recent years. Results from media frame analysis show that already in the 1990s organic was not portrayed as a radical driver of change, and the emergence of new product-centered frames indicate an increasing representation of organic farming as simply a green production method.

KEYWORDS:

• Organic farming
• media frames
• news coverage
• food system transformation
• alternative food movements

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, whose feedback has strongly contributed to the quality of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There is no consensus among scientist if conventionalization is currently taking place (Constance et al., 2015; Seidel et al., 2019) or how a possible conventionalization should be measured (Darnhofer et al., 2010).

2 Because of its often vague application (Cacciatore et al., 2016), and potential overlaps with other concepts like agenda setting (Scheufele, 2000), it is important to specify the type of frame analysis used. We follow a sociologically influenced “emphasis framing” approach that focuses more on what aspects of a topic are presented in media and puts less emphasize on how certain preexisting cognitive schemas of the audiences get activated (Cacciatore et al., 2016).

3 DeReKo allows to specify the number of sentences before and after the key word you want to retrieve. We searched for 100 sentences before and after the key word. Sometimes it was not possible to retrieve the whole article just passages of text before and after the key word.

4 Although the number of articles that cover the existing support for organic farming is lower than in “recognized niche” the number of article that do not even deal with the issue of support is much higher.