Analysis of the Environmental Agenda in Local Mass Media and Social Media in the Context of Social Communication Gaps

The paper deals with the analysis of the environmental agenda setting in local mass media, social media and emerging communication gaps. The theoretical and methodological basis for the study of environmental communication gaps is the theory of agenda setting and the factor model of mass communication by G. Maletzke, who takes into account the "pressure" of the mediator and various social and psychological characteristics of the subjects. The aim of the study is to analyze communication gaps in environmental agenda in mass media and social media in the Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk regions. The study applies a set of methods, namely comparative analysis, document analysis with the elements of content analysis, and a survey. Communication gap is understood as a state of ineffective communication, accompanied by interference and barriers, misinterpretations, and one-way communication. The study is based on 4701 environmental media texts from 16 mass media sources and 7 VK social communities in Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk regions for the period 2019-2023. The respondents are 305 people aged between 18 and 30 as the most active users of modern information technologies who receive information online and represent the largest group of the population consuming information from digital media. The analysis of environmental media coverage reveals the following gaps: thematic gaps that manifest in the thematic asymmetry of the information narrative; psycholinguistic as a predominance of negative headlines; political and organizational gaps expressing the uneven representation of the interests of environmental communication participants in the information agenda; reputation gaps as a lack of trust in information sources among the population; and behavioral gaps as a low involvement in solving environmental problems. The presence of communication gaps leads to insufficient interaction between participants in the communication process in solving environmental problems and its low efficiency.