News Framing on the Case of Stephanie Scolaro: Sensational News Versus Environmental

On January 21st, 2019, an English Instagram model Stephanie Scolaro was sentenced to 160 hours of community service and £20,000 fine. She was convicted of participating in illegal trade when she purchased various snakeskin products from Indonesia in the form of baseball caps, bags, and also raw skins. In Indonesia, snakeskin trade is a subject to trade quotas and hunting quotas set by the Ministry of Environment and Forestry. Whereas the United Kingdom has adopted the CITES convention in the trading animals’ body parts. This case was highlighted by the media in both the UK and Indonesia because Scolaro is a well-known social media celebrity. She has more than 100,000 followers, which created a high news value for the media that generate sensationalism. Because of the sensational value of the case, it is interesting to see how the media in both countries framed this incident. The framing analysis was done towards five media in the UK and five media in Indonesia. The result shows that the media of both countries are more interested in raising the sensational news value rather than the perspective of environmental journalism. Moreover, it was found that most of the reports on Indonesian media only refer to the news that appeared in the UK’s media rather than looking for information from local sources in Indonesia. Based on the result, the study suggests that media managers need to be more aware of environmental journalism so that audiences will be appropriately educated about environmental conservation.