With a growing number of people facing water shortages around the world, the conservation, management and use of water is emerging as one of the most important environmental problems of the 21st century. Conflicts over water access and quality have led to stubborn, long-running controversies pitting differing opinions about who has a right to water against each other. These disputes have typically been studied through econometric perspectives or theories developed to explain environmental or community conflict in general without taking into account the characteristics of water itself (not as a mineral but as a social artifact) that make conflicts over it unique.

            Our study contributes to a better understanding of these attitudes by examining how newspaper coverage of a dispute over an aquifer in Oklahoma was framed by newspapers in two different media markets. Previous research has found that, water, like many natural resources, is not clearly bounded by geographic or social boundaries such as political jurisdictions. As a result of this, and of deep-seated attitudes toward the environment, some people tend to regard water as a form of private property over which they have individual rights, while others see water as a common heritage which everyone has a stake in preserving. Media research shows that framing, in the form of words, phrases or images, can act as an unconscious heuristic, giving audiences cues to what a conflict is “really” about. Beginning in 2002, a group of communities in the center of Oklahoma wanted to import water from the Arbuckle-Simpson aquifer, 90 miles to the southeast. This plan was supported by growers and ranchers defending their right to sell the water under their land to distant communities and opposed by an alliance of local citizens arguing for the concept of the aquifer as a common good. The Arbuckle-Simpson dispute coincided with two different political jurisdictions and newspaper markets, Oklahoma City and Ada OK. Would differing attitudes toward the conflict emerge in differences in the way newspapers in the two markets framed their stories? Examining 158 articles from four newspapers (three in Oklahoma City, one in Ada) we found that property rights frames were present in one third of the articles studied. However the number of these differed significantly on a year-to-year basis and these differences were not the same in the two markets, indicating that readers in the two markets were receiving measurably different messages about the controversy.

            Previous research on attitudes toward water were largely confined to broad estimates. We consider these findings a first exploratory step toward precisely gauging how they emerge in the communication products people consume every day. Because policy must take public attitudes into account, our results can help lead to natural resource policy more closely based on empirical evidence of what those complex attitudes are and how they function.