After years of steadily growing interest, coronavirus has eclipsed media attention for environmental issues. Last year, the health emergency ended up monopolising the interest of print, radio, television and online outlets, pushing green topics to the margins of public debate. And yet at the start of 2020 the spotlight had been turned on these issues, thanks above all to the appeals of Pope Francis and to European policies anchored in the green new deal. The Rapporto Eco-Media 2020 – the annual "bulletin" that monitors the attention paid by leading media outlets to environmental issues – also notes a certain recovery in recent months: for 72 per cent of Italians, Next Generation Eu is fundamental to relaunching development along sustainable lines.

With coronavirus, the environment disappeared from public debate

The negative reversal in the trend came at the beginning of March, when the health emergency and the resulting socio-economic crisis claimed ever-growing space in news outlets. "It was supposed to be the year of the green turning point to halt the climate crisis," explains Massimiliano Pontillo, director of the report, "but the global pandemic reshaped the priorities of the media and of public debate. The face of Greta Thunberg and the European green deal gave way to bulletins, maps and epidemiological curves."

The pandemic came to occupy 85 per cent of the available space in news outlets. The frequency of Covid-19 news stories followed the rise and fall of contagion. The result, Pontillo further notes, is that "the health context overwhelmed the planet, pushing environmental issues into a corner, where they were covered only sporadically by news outlets. We also observe another very critical finding: the absence of a scientifically proven link between the environment and coronavirus."

Television, newspapers and the web: how the figures change

Ten keywords were selected, nine of which have an affinity with the environmental sphere, while one is "Covid-19/Coronavirus." The analysis covered four months, from 25 May to 24 September. Two new features compared with the 2019 research: both the web and information circulating through social media were examined, with a focus on fake news. For the television section, the frequency of environment-related keywords relative to that of health-emergency coverage is markedly lower: 106 against 718. The word "Covid-19, coronavirus" appeared in every survey, with very high absolute values and a peak on 25 May, when the keyword was recorded 58 times: this despite Italy not being in a period of maximum alert, since the first lockdown had ended three weeks earlier and the second wave had not yet broken out; and yet the pandemic topic was very prominent, even at the expense of environmental coverage.

National newspapers showed sensitivity to the environment only when addressing it within a broader economic or political context, whereas local titles demonstrated greater attention. For the web section, despite the difficulty of obtaining a precise overview of the coverage across the sites analysed, out of a total of 6,165 news items the environment was covered in 18 per cent of cases, against 82 per cent for coronavirus. More broadly, despite several studies having linked coronavirus and the environment, this aspect received scant media prominence: such is the case with research that correlated pollution with an increase in the Covid-19 mortality rate, or with a study connecting the halt of productive activities and traffic following the lockdown to a reduction in deaths from inhaling toxic gases. Undeniably significant stories — yet most media preferred to focus on the disposal of face masks inside hospitals.