Author: Dan Gibbins
The third in a series of reports tracking coverage of the oil sands through the traditional and internet media. These media monitors track how the oil sands are being perceived from both an environmental and economic perspective.
The media monitoring process used for this report made use of the Google search engine’s Google Alerts feature. Each day, the Google engine searched the internet for related stories and delivered the hits in an email. Three search terms were used to guide the internet searches: “oil sands,” “oilsands” (there being some debate on whether it is one word or two) and “tar sands.” The vast majority of sites criticizing the oil sands use the more pejorative term “tar sands,” so in order to receive a more complete snapshot of public opinion the term had to be included in the search. Also included in the search was the French term for oil sands, “sables bitumineux.”
This process brought in several hundred items: once re-posts and stories not connected or only peripherally connected to the oil sands were weeded out, there remained a total of 237 stories over the course of May, 2009. These stories were gathered from blogs and environmental websites and Canadian and international media reaching audiences around Canada and the world.
The stories were analyzed and broken into two categories: environmental and economic. Stories that portrayed the oil sands in a positive light through their contribution to the Canadian economy, value to energy security or advances in efficiency, or stories in which corporations and governments defend the development of the oil sands were classified as “positive.” Stories whose focus was on the costs of oil sands development such as carbon emissions, water use, job loss or falling stock prices, or stories that called attention to such costs without also presenting the benefits of the oil sands were classified as “negative.” Stories that discussed the oil sands without comment on their costs or benefits, or which discussed both equally, were classified as “neutral.”