Media attention and sustainable development policy in Montréal, 1987-2009
To become a collective social project, sustainable development (SD) needs the support of all citizens and decision makers. Essential to this process is an understanding of the concept by all those who contribute to social and territorial development. Through their influence in shaping public opinion and political thinking, the media play a major role in this respect. The applicability and staying power of the achievement of SD in a society depend on how the media and political spheres comprehend, integrate and communicate the sustainable development discourse. The goal of this article is to examine the media and political response to SD in Montréal between 1987 and 2009. We analyse the ways in which media coverage of the issue of sustainability and the implementation of Montréal’s First Strategic Plan for Sustainable Development (2005-2009) are connected, on both a quantitative and qualitative level. Our results demonstrate possible structural effects of the Strategic Plan on issue-attention cycles around the question of sustainability in the Montréal news media. They also show that the Plan and the print media do not always stress the same areas of SD, although the interpretations they present tend to more closely converge from the early 2000s onwards.