Framing Environmental Risks and Natural Disasters in Factual Entertainment Television

This article examines the framing of environmental risks and natural disasters in factual entertainment television programs of the early 2000s, a hybrid form combining techniques from documentary with techniques such as dramatic reconstructions and computer generated imagery from entertainment genres. Using qualitative frame analysis, the article examines a range of factual entertainment television programs’ framing of environmental risk and natural disasters in terms of their attitudes, representation of human participants, and visual composition. The article considers the similarities and differences in the framing of natural disasters as factual entertainment compared to the framing of natural disasters in news, documentary and fiction film. The article argues that such programs offer representational frames both consonant with and distinct from other media, and concludes that they problematically offer a predominantly fatalistic response to environmental risk, constructing natural disasters as voyeuristic spectacles for vicarious entertainment.