| Summary: | Due to climate change, the fishing industry, tourism and resource extraction Antarctica has become and increasingly more common topic in mass media around the world. Despite this, and the importance given to mass media in terms of impact on public awareness and policy making, little is known about how Antarctic issues are portrayed and its influence on the public arena. This essay looks at how four newspapers in the UK and the US portray Antarctica by comparing a sample test with existing literature on quantitative journalistic norms and values. It also compares the results with the findings of studies made on the relationship between climate change coverage and its influence on public knowledge. There is a consensus that the general public lacks knowledge and interest in Antarctic issues, however, this assumption has no statistical evidence to back it up. This essay demonstrate that there is a possibility that the general public is uninformed, only has superficial knowledge about Antarctic issues or simply doesn't consider them to be important. But, it stresses that the need and urgency for further, in depth studies are crucial to our understanding of medias influence on the knowledge of the general public.
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