Sustainable development goals and media framing: an analysis of road safety governance in Bangladeshi newspapers
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Sustainable development goals and media framing: an analysis of road safety governance in Bangladeshi newspapers Arjuman Naziz1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This paper seeks to explore how Bangladeshi newspapers frame road safety governance. It investigates the prevalence of five news frames—responsibility, conflict, human interest, economic consequence and morality, in news stories on road safety in Bangladesh. Taking a deductive approach to qualitative content analysis, a total of ninety three (93) news stories from July 29 to August 30, 2018, were analyzed from four Bangladeshi newspapers. The findings suggest that the most common frame in news stories on road safety was the attribution of responsibility frame, followed by the conflict frame and human interest frame, respectively. In most of the cases, the government was seen as responsible for the problem, rather than the individual actors. It is argued that each of the frames can construct a distinct picture of the reality in which road safety is positioned and influence the policy preferences of the audience. Keywords Framing · Governance · Road safety · Construction of reality · Attribution of responsibility
Introduction Each year, over 21,000 people die in Bangladesh as a result of road accidents (WHO 2015). The annual economic cost of these accidents is equivalent to two percent of the total GDP of the country. Bangladesh needs to halve the number of deaths on roads by 2020, in order to achieve the targets set in the sustainable development goals (SDG-3.6). Given the current rate of casualties in road accidents, it is unlikely that the country will be able to achieve this target (Adhikary 2019 April 25). The existing legal provisions for road safety in Bangladesh have been inadequate (WHO 2015). Since the enactment of the Road Transport Act 2018, it became evident that the state agencies lack the capacity and coherence to enforce the newly enacted law (Mamun 2019 November 1). The political economic factors, including the conflicting mandates of the key stakeholders, serving particularistic interests,
* Arjuman Naziz [email protected] 1
Department of Public Administration, Jahangirnagar University, Savar, Bangladesh
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have contributed into the disruptive nature of the transport sector in Bangladesh (World Bank 2009; PPRC 2014). Generally, the most likely source of information on serious hazards such as road accidents is the mass media (Singer and Endreny 1993). The manner in which media portrays road accidents can influence the audiences’ understanding of the causes and solutions of the problem. When road crashes are framed as ‘mini-dramas’, in a ‘victim’ versus the ‘villain’ scene, news stories may miss the opportunity to situate it in the broader public health context (Connor and Wesolowski 2004). Such portrayal may risk positioning road accidents as an ‘individual issue’ (Beullens et al. 2008), unavoidable, unpredictable and often determined by the
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