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Abstract
This study examined how national newspapers have participated in the production and reproduction of the discourse on ecotage through a lens of terrorism. The approach used in this study is to apply the thesis of Altheide (2003) that mass media uses the discourse of fear to report on acts of terrorism. Through a content analysis of six national newspapers, this study sought to answer two questions: Do national newspapers frame ecotage acts primarily as terrorism? If ecotage is framed as terrorism, is the discourse of fear used in stories that discuss ecotage? Using 20 search terms commonly used to describe ecotage acts, 155 news stories were found from 1984 to 2006. Based on an analysis of these stories, there was a marked shift in framing ecotage as terrorism starting in 2001, but before 9/11. Increasingly the discourse of fear has been used to indicate the seriousness of ecoterrorism. In addition to this shift and use of fear, the volume of stories has increased, yet the number of reported incidences of ecotage has steadily declined over this same period.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Sandra Wachholz and Chris Powell of The University of Southern Maine's Criminology Department for providing important suggestions on theoretical applications. In addition, I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers who provided valuable suggestions to improve the paper.
Notes
1. Ecotage is different from environmental sabotage, which involves intentional acts to harm the environment (Chalecki, Citation2001).
2. Variations of many terms were also searched using wildcards. For example, “ecoterror” followed by an asterisk (*) was used, which captured, for example, “ecoterror,” “ecoterrorism,” and “ecoterrorist.”
3. Although not part of the study because it was a commentary, the first time the term ecoterrorist appears in a headline is a commentary in March Citation1990 by Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta in The Washington Post titled “Tree Spiking: An ‘‘Eco-Terrorist’’ Tactic.”