A longitudinal analysis on the perspectives of major world newspapers on the Three Gorges Dam project during 1982-2015

Abstract

Media communications are least studied in river basin development projects. This paper aims to develop a longitudinal study on how a water resources development megaproject was reported by the world newspapers during its whole life cycle. The development of the Three Gorges Dam project in China (1982-2015) was taken as an example. Newspaper perspectives on eight evaluation themes: time, cost, quality, risk, benefit, social impact, environmental impact, and organization management were extracted from eight newspapers in the UK, the USA, Australia, and Singapore using a content analysis approach. The results show that the media coverage mainly appeared in the construction phase, with peak repo..