Abstract
This edited collection, originally published as a special issue of Journalism Studies: Theory and Practice in April 2012, is timely and relevant to public concerns and professional challenges. Environmental issues continue to grow in scope: dangers accelerate with global change, with time to address such developments becoming increasingly precious. Huge areas of concern, such as climate change, food safety, and disaster prevention and mitigation, go beyond the realm of science into complex arenas of politics, economics, and health. It is hard to nail down what is happening or about to happen, and therefore it is difficult to find areas of certainty to turn into news. This book elucidates why that is and what has resulted, so far, by examining processes through which environmental news is shaped and framed.
There are challenges to this kind of reporting. Journalism addressing environmental issues must deal with what it means to report within, about, to, and for a global community facing common risks of significant magnitude. Do norms of neutrality and balance, for example, cause more harm than good by allowing ill-informed and controversial views relatively equal footing with consensual matters of fact? What is the larger message when the preponderance of environmental reportage is episodic, provoked by disasters, rather than thematic and long term? And then, how can journalists report on areas that involve so much inherent uncertainty, even on the part of experts? The material within the book’s essays is at times “unsettling as well as enlightening,” as series editor Franklin wrote in the preface (p. 1).
In their introduction, editors Bodker (of Aarhus University, Denmark) and Neverla (of the University of Hamburg, Germany) note that by studying something that does not quite fit—in this case, climate change—“established practices are made more visible; and emergent practices may be glimpsed” (p. 2). The first three chapters after the introduction deal with framing, looking at processes and actors that interact to make something a public problem, and whether global scientific consensus or domestic political discussions among elites wins out in influencing coverage and perception. Objectivity and advocacy are the focus of the next two chapters. The final three studies extend the book’s focus to include consideration of major players from the worlds of business, intellectual consortiums (think tanks), and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Bodker and Neverla suggest the collected studies presage “a certain shift in the role of journalists . . . in which user communities with specific global concerns start to challenge the adherence of journalism to the maintenance of the nation state” (p. 6).
Citing just three of the chapter titles gives an idea of the book’s scope: “Climate Change Controversies in French Mass Media 1990-2010,” “Participatory Politics, Environmental Journalism and Newspaper Campaigns,” and “Talking Points Ammo: The Use of Neoliberal Think Tank Fantasy Themes to Delegitimize Scientific Knowledge of Climate Change in Australian Newspapers.”
The book is a rich and well-chosen volume of current research, but it may be in its reach that it has most value, taking this beyond being a ready resource for directed scholarly work into a provocative springboard for wide-ranging discussion. The authors raise questions of whether journalism’s role in contemporary society needs to change because society itself has changed. Howarth, for example, maintains that “aspirations of objective reportage are outdated and ill-equipped . . . (and calls for) a wholesale relocation of our frameworks into approaches better suited to the socio-political conditions of late modernity” (p. 60).
In making those arguments, the scholars employ both quantitative and qualitative methods in traditional and hybrid ways, including content, textual, discourse, field, close-read, statistical, and theme analyses. Much of the book is concerned with identifying news frames; one study also utilizes in-depth interviews with key actors to further contextualize the discussion. Geographically, the book explores aspects of environmental coverage and information influence in Bangladesh, Sweden, the United States, the United Kingdom, Argentina, France, Australia, and Norway. A limitation of the book is that it mostly concerns itself with print newspaper content. Doing so makes it easier to compare coverage across cultures but leaves a major hole: visuals on broadcast venues (and, increasingly, on social media) are powerful communication vehicles, especially during times of high emotion when they are most likely to be shared.
Theoretical approaches in the eight research articles, drawing on multiple disciplines, are varied. Among them are the following: sociology of public problems, first- and second-level agenda-setting, international news flow, media sociology, journalistic agency, construction of social reality, invisibility, symbolic convergence, social agency, critical media discourse, and media construction. Within some of the chapters are explanations of how various analytical techniques have evolved. Mercado’s work, for example, contains both example and description of how content analysis has expanded to include qualitative and hybrid methodology.
It is easy to see this book as the focal point of a graduate-level course that combines a topic of current relevance with dissections of theoretical and methodological approaches. This is not a text per se for undergraduates, although high “reachers” among them will find it instructive. The questions raised within the book could spark provocative and lively class discussion at any educational level, however, for both scholarly and hands-on, professional programs. The volume deserves a place in reading lists for courses dealing with sustainability and ecological issues, most certainly. The book is an especially good candidate for courses looking at journalistic conceptions, routines, and roles, and how they vary by culture and need.