Abstract
The climate and the environment do not recognise borders, and neither do new media. This global scope, along with other aspects, makes the assessment of the relations between the media and environmental issues a daunting task. This is, nonetheless, what Alison G. Anderson attempts in Media, Environment and the Network Society in which she lays out a broader framework for understanding how the interplay between issues, actors and media shape our perceptions of the environment.
As suggested by the title, Castells’ notion of the ‘network society’ is one of the cornerstones in Anderson’s analysis; the other is Beck’s ‘risk society’. These broad theories – and their relations to the environment – constitute the overall conceptual frame of the book, which is presented in chapter 2 ‘Environmental risks, protest, and the network society’. This frame is supplemented by more media and journalism-specific theories: agenda setting, framing and issue attention cycles. The significance of these for the coverage of environmental issues is the focus of chapter 3 ‘News agendas, framing, contests and power’. A part of this is a return to recurrent discussions of how the complexity and temporality of climate change and the environment relate to central aspects of journalistic practices, for example, source relations, news values and – not least – the possibility of visual renderings.
The remaining chapters are thematic: ‘The climate change controversy’, ‘Oil spills and crisis communication’, ‘Emerging technologies’ and, finally, ‘Future directions’. Aspects from the introduced theories continue to crop up and the overall analysis is thus somewhat cumulative; yet each of the thematic chapters constitutes its own independent narratives based on a wide range of existing research from around the world. At times, this produces a kaleidoscopic feeling that makes it difficult to assess and combine the many, sometimes opposing, results. This is, for instance, the case with the many detailed presentations of studies of how people in different countries perceive nanotechnology (chapter 6).
But this confusion is arguably a part of the overall narrative in the sense that Anderson continuously stresses that the coverage of the environment (and technological ‘solutions’) is the product of dynamically shifting relations between events, sources, citizens, politicians, regulators, scientists, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), corporate interests and – of course – journalists and editors. The question is whether such complex and shifting relations within different cultural settings can be conceptualised on an overall level. Anderson thinks so and ends by pointing to a specific model, the ‘Gate Resonance Model’ (p. 167).
Whether this is the right model is arguably not so important. What is important, however, is that Anderson – as part of the modelling attempt – calls for and points towards non-media centric approaches. Too much research, she rightly argues, is based on content analyses of (elite) newspapers; what we increasingly need to investigate is how the many interests at stake are constructed over time and across different media. This is precisely why Anderson’s thematic chapters unfold as narratives that portray shifting power relations as various environmental issues unfold in the media.
A prime example of this is the discussion of how the framing of climate change, the ‘most serious of our time’ (p. 61), has changed over time in chapter 4. Mainly based on studies from the United States and the United Kingdom, she draws out some of the factors behind the ‘peaks and troughs of levels of news media attention and public concern over time’ (p. 62). An important aspect is the rise of increasingly sophisticated ways of conducting strategic communication, for example, by conservative think tanks, in the service of ‘manufacturing uncertainty’ (p. 88), or, as was the case with BP in the aftermath of the Mexican Gulf oil spill (discussed in chapter 5), the ability to optimise web searches in order to steer online discussions. This effort was estimated to have, for certain search terms, been ‘driving 47 percent of all traffic to BP.com’ (p. 115).
Although it may be difficult to know exactly what to do with such snippets of information, they are highly interesting and the book is full of them. There is help, however, in the overall frame that governs the book and its narratives. The book is ‘about power – the power to influence news media agendas and propel issues onto the agenda’, or keep them off (p. 3). Such power relations are continuously shifting, and in order to get a more nuanced understanding of how this works, we need, Anderson argues, more detailed studies, for example, ‘ethnographic case studies that trace the evolution of an issue’ or ‘rigorous empirical analysis of source-media relations including more systematic analysis of the strategic and tactical action of news sources (e.g. scientists, NGOs, industry, policymakers)’ (p. 166).
In its mixture of theories, presentations and discussions of earlier research as well as attempts to get parts of this varied body of literature to speak to each other, Anderson’s book is a brilliant place to start in order to understand some of the major issues at stake in how public perceptions of the environment are formed. Although one can question the productivity of the overall theoretical framework (network and risk society), there is a wealth of nuanced renderings of studies, theoretical insights and pertinent discussions of some of the political, cultural and professional contexts and processes that propel or hinder public discussions of the environment that are adequate to the severity of the issue.