Abstract
Editors Libby Lester and Brett Hutchins are both professors in Australian Universities (Melbourne and Monash, respectively) and many of the case studies here of media coverage of environmental conflict are Australian. Series editor Simon Cottle spent several years as media studies professor in Australia. The series, Global Crises and the Media, represents too rare a commodity in media studies: an academic attempt at meaningful response to the greatest crises of our times. The foci here include specific media, activism, and communication of crisis, news reporting, and frames. The book’s four divisions span “old” and “new” technologies (with strong emphasis on social media), activism and campaigns, communication crises, and contested claims.
Cottle’s introduction summarizes what is known about media and environmental conflict, and invokes the “public arenas” model as one tool among others as one that helpfully invokes the carrying capacities of different media, principles of selection, and networks of operatives. Cottle advocates attention to the interpenetration of specific crises with ecology and other global dynamics, including violent conflicts. He observes that conflicts may also contain the seeds for increased cooperation and holds out hope for the study of new media and the transnational politics of connectivity. Michael Meadows and Robert Thomson, from their study of local press coverage of national parks conclude that the local press reveals the significance and effectiveness of local campaigns. Alex Lockwood, reflecting on a U.K. campaign to save publicly owned woodland from privatization, is concerned with the efficacy of the affective—feelings and emotions—in environmental campaigns. He picks up the concept of “intimate public,” one that is less concerned with information and more with the “structures of feeling” and their nurture through social media. These tag moments of sensibility and mood. Catherine Collins considers YouTube in the context of protests against clear-cutting of old growth forests in Tasmania and the Pacific Northwest. She emphasizes the importance of constructing narratives that are crafted to appeal to people other than those who already agree with the message. Images supplement information and also represent forms of information, as Daniel Palmer argues in his consideration of how photography helps citizens to re-imagine environmental data and ecologize their collective lives by unsettling what appears “natural” in conventional in-the-moment images, instead capturing, sometimes over time, assemblages of biological, technological, economic, and governmental factors.
Lynn McGuarr brings together travel journalism, environmental protest, power, and the Internet. She shows that travel journalism often enjoys tacit relationships with the travel industry, but also has a shared interest both with industry and environmental activists in conservation, and may be more motivated in the future to prioritize credibility with the reader over maintaining good access to powerful sources.
Silvio Waisbord examines the lessons of the asambleismo movement against the establishment of pulp mills on the Uruguay River in Argentina. He criticizes the failure of mainstream media to provide a wider context for the understanding of the expansion of the extractive industries and their relevance to citizen demands for environmental justice. Environmental journalists have no choice, he argues, other than to take account of the editorial and professional biases of news media. And should they choose to fight their cause online, then Kitty Van Vuuren’s contribution counsels them to remain alert to how easy it is for mainstream media and opponents to seize upon online comments and use them against their sources. At the same time, she finds that online reports and comments were given far greater authority in her study than local news reports. Dan Brockington considers the place of celebrity in media coverage of environmental conflicts. Michelle Voyer et al. consider the not-always-progressive role of the local in mediating global messages. In their case study, the growth of a grassroots movement around recreational fishing allowed politicians to capitalize on the conflict by promising a redistribution of power.
Morgan Richards considers the wildlife documentary and, in particular, the work of David Attenborough for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Wildlife documentary has traditionally evaded environmental issues—these were considered antithetical to the genre and to audience pleasure. As evidence behind global warming became more concrete, it allowed BBC producers room for a subtle shift of framing of environmental issues, toward a focusing on environmental threats problems while showing that solutions exist.
Myra Gurney observes how the expression of moral or ethical claims in environmental coverage is frequently reduced to the narrowing of contributors’ concerns to economic rather than broader ethical issues. She critiques the prevailing discourse of the “market” as a form of animism that focuses on the welfare of individuals as “consumers” while denying the power of sovereign governments to speak about climate change in ways that contradict the neoliberal narrative.
Kumi Kato confronts this in the case of coverage of Fukushima and in particular, of the insistence of the Japanese government on the resumption of nuclear operations in face of the opposition of 80% of the public. Clio Kentereidou finds that communication with the public is integral to any part of the response to crisis, not just at the end but also at the planning and problem-formulation stage.
Robert Cox identifies some of the countervailing sites in which scientists, journalists, and others engage in how environmental issues are produced and distributed to wider publics. Chris Nash and Wendy Bacon note that a significant percentage of reporting does not take an implicit or explicit stance on the fundamental question of whether climate change poses a threat to small island states. While this may suggest a lack of balance in the majority of reports, it might also be read as inconsistent with the scientific consensus that climate change does pose such a threat.
Alanna Myers argues that the vehemence with which both sides (unequal in weight though they are, from the perspective of scientific consensus) defend their position unmasks the debate as one about who has the right to participate in the debate as well as one about climate change. Guobin Yang and Craig Calhoun investigate the rise of a Green public sphere in China, and lend their support to the argument that the state corporatist perspective on Chinese society is no longer adequate.
In an afterword, Senator Christine Milne, leader of the Australian Greens, argues that new media do not create new societies, but that they do enable new movements to emerge and solidify. This groundbreaking book amply confirms her observation.