Representation of Environmental Crisis of Urmia Lake in Television Series (Case Study: Darya Series)

This research has been conducted with the aim of content analysis of the environmental crisis of Urmia Lake in the IRIB TV series. At first, we enjoyed the theoretical bases of environmental communication concerning the role of media in forming the interaction between societies and the environment, informing and the ways to tackle environmental crises. Then, we investigated “communication messages”, “the triple of social learning and socialization”, “agenda-setting” and “framing” theories based on the centrality of meaning construction. In this study, qualitative content analysis has been used with an arbitrary approach without enforcing pre-determined categories. The statistical population is Darya series and the themes relevant to the research topic have been selected and analyzed. In Darya series, the Urmia Lake’s environmental crisis has forced obvious social and economic effects on the communities surrounding the drainage basin some of which include unemployment, immigration, the rise of crime, the disappearance of agriculture, disabling of shipping, and the tourism industry. Darya series presents two categories of “water resources management” and “correction of the unparallel development of agriculture trend” as solutions to pass the crises, and draws the future of revival of Urmia Lake as promising. In this series, human is the most effective parameter in the emergence of the Urmia Lake’s environmental problem, but the series suffices with the human actions as farmers at the microlevel, without dealing with the problems of macro-level measures of the system.