Even if environmentalist groups’ aims, objectives and methods have often been misrepresented by the news media, the relationship between the two sets of organisations is best described as a matter of ‘co-evolution’
by Nils Lindahl Elliot
In a recent article in the Guardian, George Monbiot described the London Evening Standard’s representation of last summer’s environmental protest at Heathrow Airport (1). According to Monbiot, the paper’s journalist, Rashid Razaq, presented as fact false allegations that the protestors were planning to plant hoax suspicious packages in the airport’s terminal, and that they were planning to mount an assault on the airport perimeter. What began, and indeed remained throughout as a peaceful protest ended up being framed as a kind of ‘green terrorism’.
Environmental educators will know that there is a long history of such representations of environmental activism. At the time that she was writing Silent Spring in the early 1960s, Rachel Carson was very aware that she had to be extraordinarily cautious when it came to presenting her groundbreaking evidence about the harmful effects of DDT and other pesticides. According to Carson biographer Linda Lear, Carson told a friend that ‘They are such powerful adversaries: the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the business empires and the ever-increasing practice of monoculture’(2). And indeed, after Silent Spring was published, many of the news media in the US were quite happy to reproduce the views of the National Agricultural Chemicals Association, which reportedly spent in excess of $250.000—a huge figure at the time—to try to discredit Carson. Ezra Taft Benson, a former Secretary of Agriculture and the thirteenth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was even allowed to ask ‘Why a spinster with no children was so concerned about genetics’, a question which he himself answered by suggesting that Carson was ‘probably a Communist’(3). As this quote makes clear, in Carson’s time as in our own, it was all too easy to try to establish an equivalence between the actions of environmental activists, and the most reviled forces of subversion.
The Evening Standard, like the Daily Mail, is a tabloid owned by the Associated Newspapers, a media organisation that is not exactly known for the progressive character of its politics. Environmental protesters at Heathrow might thus have expected unsympathetic coverage from one or both papers. More surprising, perhaps, was the publication on March 9, 2008 of an article in the Sunday Times that effectively demolished New Labour’s case for the radical expansion of Heathrow Airport. The Sunday Times—Rupert Murdoch’s flagship broadsheet in the UK—suggested that the BAA (the privatised British Airport Authority, owned by the Spanish corporate giant Ferrovial) had ‘colluded with government officials to “fix” the evidence in favour of a new third runway at Heathrow’. The paper said that documents obtained under freedom of information laws revealed that
‘BAA gave instructions to DfT [Department for Tranport] officials on how to “strip out” data that indicated key environmental targets would be breached by the airport. The airports operator repeatedly selected alternative data used for the consultation to ensure that the final results showed a negligible impact on noise and pollution. The DfT gave BAA unprecedented access to confidential papers and allowed the company to help to rewrite the consultation document. The final document significantly reduced the likely carbon emissions caused by the runway by not including incoming international flights’(4).
While the politics behind this article may well have been rather complex (5), the article could hardly be said to be ‘anti-green’. On the contrary, the article was almost certainly a godsend to all those who had long suspected New Labour claims regarding the impact of a third runway at Heathrow. After the article was published, the Department for the Environment was effectively forced to ‘issue a leak’, and, according to the Guardian, the leak confirmed that the plans for a third runway would indeed breach the EU directives on nitrous dioxide pollution, leading to increased mortality rates across the south-east of England(6).
The article in the Sunday Times was one of several media representations that suggested a possible shift in the environmental politics of the mass media. Indeed, it would appear that something like a watershed occurred between 2004 and 2007. During this period, the news media reported on a number of increasingly confident scientific assessments regarding the validity of the thesis of human-induced climate change. The reports coincided with the relatively sudden loss of political capital amongst the British and U.S. groups that had worked the hardest to undermine the thesis of climate change, or to dissimulate its implications. But the reports also coincided with the production of several high profile, and explicitly didactic media representations such as the Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006). Viewed in the context of climate events such as Hurricane Katrina—which were themselves linked by some media to climate change—these and other events might well have helped to break the dam of public scepticism vis-à-vis human-induced climate change which had been built over the last decade or so.
The question that I’d like to address in this post is, do the mentioned media representations contradict the views of those environmental activists who have long assumed that the media are systematically biased against environmental protest? If they do, might it be that representations such as the Evening Standard’s are a kind of dinosaur-like ‘regression’ that will increasingly be ‘a thing of the past’?
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The conventional discourse about the relationship between the mass media and environmental activism hinges on a professional code of practice that requires media producers to be impartial and objective. A good example of this discourse may be found in the BBC’s editorial guidelines, which suggest that ‘the BBC is committed to impartiality’. This means, amongst other things, that the corporation seeks to provide ‘a properly balanced service consisting of a wide range of subject matter and views broadcast over an appropriate time scale across all our output’, and to ‘reflect a wide range of opinion and explore a range and conflict of views so that no significant strand of thought is knowingly unreflected [sic] or under represented’. The Corporation aims to ‘ensure [that] we avoid bias or an imbalance of views on controversial subjects’. Its ‘journalists and presenters, including those in news and current affairs, may provide professional judgments but may not express personal opinions on matters of public policy or political or industrial controversy’ and ‘[o]ur audiences should not be able to tell from BBC programmes or other BBC output the personal views of our journalists and presenters on such matters’(7).
While some might regard the BBC as a paragon of this ethos, similar values are espoused by many if not most other mainstream news media in the UK, the U.S. and many other countries. It is interesting to note, in this sense, that even tabloid papers like the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail must at least profess an adherence to such values; failure to do so might result in action by the UK’s Press Complaints Commission, or, more seriously, by the British courts.
While guidelines such as the BBC’s shape many journalists’ conceptions of the nature of media representation, environmentalist activists have long regarded the discourse of impartiality as being at best an imperfect constraint on media ‘bias’, and at worst a smokescreen for corporate and political interests. Indeed, at the height of the green backlash that occurred after the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, a number of environmentalists concluded that it was necessary to reconceptualise the aforementioned ‘bias’. For example, in 1998, David Edwards wrote in The Ecologist that ‘the media is made up of large corporations all in the business of maximizing profits, all tied into the stock market. This immediately suggests that media corporations might have a tendency to be sympathetic to corporations, to the status quo and to the profit-maximizing motive of the corporate system’. While Edwards acknowledged that ‘Certainly, less damaging information will be allowed to reach the public’ and also that ‘This does not mean that the truth will be completely excluded’, he was clear that he believed that there was something like a systematic bias on the part of the media against the environmental movement(8).
In a similar article published in the New Internationalist a couple of years later, David Cromwell suggested that ‘the media are big business, tied into stock markets and the globalized economy. Media owners are wealthy people with many fingers in many business pies and are dependent on the support of advertisers. How likely is it that anyone calling for radical change in society – whether environmentalists, human-rights activists or opponents of the arms trade – will be consistently and fairly reported by corporate news organizations?’ In Cromwell’s view, Herman and Chomsky’s ‘propaganda model of media control’ (9) provided a good framework with which to interpret the media’s role vis-à-vis environmental activism: ‘Their argument is that market forces act as ‘filters’ which determine what news is ‘fit to print’. One of these filters is simply the nature of media ownership. The sheer size, concentrated ownership, immense owner wealth and quest for profit of the dominant media corporations mean that business priorities can, and do, shape editorial content’(10).
An approach such as Edwards’, Cromwell’s or indeed Herman and Chomsky’s might certainly explain aspects of representations such as the Evening Standard’s. But can it explain critical representations such as the Sunday Times’? Or indeed, can it explain the consensus that appears to have emerged amongst the news media vis-à-vis the reality of human-induced climate change?
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Several issues must be taken into account by anyone who tries to reply to these questions.
A first set of issues involve the use of concepts such as ‘the media’ or ‘the environmental movement’. These may be misleading in so far as they involve what one cultural theorist has described as ‘abstract singulars’: terms which accord a single, universal, essential quality or character to an otherwise diverse group of elements (11). While no one can ever completely avoid the use of abstract singulars, and some terms such as ‘the media’ are particularly hard to avoid, a certain use of such expressions may easily lead otherwise critical observers to overlook the real heterogeneity of the institutions, genres, technologies, discourses, and representational practices that make up the media of mass communication. Any analysis must thus begin by recognising the concrete ways in which this heterogeneity occurs, and any heterodox perspectives which the heterogeneity may enable. As we near the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it may be that a combination of factors will significantly increase the scope for heterodoxy, and may yet generate some real difficulties for the groups that could perhaps once count on the almost automatic support of certain sectors of the news and other media.
A similar critique applies to ‘the environmental movement’. A Sierra Club is not the same as Reclaim the Streets, and this may mean, amongst other things, that some news organisations may have no problem with being very supportive of ‘safe’ forms of environmental discourse even as they feel compelled to suppress, or negatively frame other forms. To be sure, even ‘safe’ forms of environmental discourse may become rather less safe for media producers and for environmental activists if the representations shift from general invocations to specific accusations.
A second set of issues involves any reference to media ‘bias’, ‘objectivity’ or ‘impartiality’. As media critics have long noted, the model of media objectivity that is commonly employed to evaluate media representations is fundamentally flawed. Even if some representations may be shown to be more accurate than others—or more accurate in some ways than in others—that is quite different from suggesting that all media representations can or should be ‘balanced’, ‘objective’, let alone ‘value-free’.
There are two general reasons why at least a naive invocation of the ethos of impartiality may be misleading. On the one hand, a strong case can be made that some representations should put forward one perspective as strongly, but also as accurately, as possible. Indeed, in some circumstances a formal sense of ‘balance’ may actually distort a certain social dynamic or perspective.
On the other hand, traditional notions of objectivity tend to be based on relatively naïve understandings of the nature of the production, dissemination, and social reception of knowledge by way of the media of mass communication. Practical constraints to do with generic formulae, the amount of space or time available to produce a representation, and the political and economic interests of the media organisations and their bureaucracies are not a matter of exception. On the contrary, they are the structural conditions under which, and with which journalists and other media producers must work to produce all manner of representations. In practice, such constraints force media producers to be selective, if not reductive with respect to the range and number of points of view that they represent. Moreover, those that they do choose to represent will certainly reflect, however indirectly or subtly, the producers’ limited knowledge and/or range of experiences.
That said, on occasion the pragmatics of a certain logic of juncture may mean that unexpected alliances may form, that hitherto ‘outlandish’ perspectives may suddenly make sense, or indeed, that perpetually ostracised ‘radicals’ may at last be invited to speak. From this point of view, a socially deterministic approach to media impartiality is as problematic as one that abstracts of all manner of social constraints.
By this account, what matters is not so much that all media producers are ‘objective’ (which is not to say that the ideal should be simply discarded), but that the state and the civil society should work to ensure that there is, firstly, a significant plurality of voices producing mass media messages. Both the state and the civil society should also try to ensure that the members of a society are educated to both expect, and understand in detail the way in which such a pluralism may work, or indeed may fail to work in a particular context. If the idealising tendencies of naive forms of liberalism are to be avoided, then it is probably safe to assume that an approach such as I have just proposed is liable, indeed likely to be co-opted by some groups.
The last set of issues that I wish to consider is more difficult to present in a succinct manner. While I am sympathetic to the general critique presented by Herman and Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent, it seems to me that any account of the relationship between the mass media and environmental activism needs to adopt a historical perspective that explores not so much the disjunction or opposition between the mass media and environmental activists, as the conjunction and continuity between these two broad categories, or their representatives. A critical reading of the practices of many environmental non-government organisations (ENGOs) suggests that, despite sharp differences and antagonisms on some levels, the ‘ecological revolution’ owes at least as much to the mass media—or rather, to the process of mass mediation—as it does to the rise of something like an ecological consciousness.
This point can be illustrated with reference to the work of Rachel Carson. Carson was by no means the first person to blow the whistle on pesticides such as DDT. She was, however, arguably the first person who found a way of both compiling, and then narrativizing research about the pesticides’ hitherto unacknowledged effects on human health. As I have suggested elsewhere (12), Carson was amongst the first ‘true’ modern environmentalists in so far as she engaged in an environmental risk politics that entailed a complex, and multi-staged form of mass mediation.
A brief excursus is required to explain the last point. The first step in this process involved discovering hitherto unknown threats to an environment, or indeed, environmental threats full stop (the two are not necessarily the same). This in turn frequently required environmentalists to transgress, and effectively reclassify public/private divides in both the economic and social senses of the term. Such a transgression was required in order to find out what corporations or governments might be up to ‘behind the scenes’, that is to say, in the private or semi-private spaces of corporate or governmental practices.
But once the initial sleuth work identified any risks, perhaps the more significant aspect of 20th century forms of environmental activism began: one of the main functions, if not the main function of environmental activists was (and remains) to develop a mass-mediated pedagogy of environmental risk, viz. teaching mass audiences about the character and extent of one or another environmental risk. Doing so required the activists to cross another public/private divide, one that now involved not the state or corporate practice, but everyday life within the domestic sphere. Environmental activists had to find a way of communicating with millions of people in the privacy of their own lives and homes. It was in this space that the ‘major’ media of mass communication, and especially television, played a fundamental, indeed constitutive role in the emergence of environmentalism as we know it today.
For example, if Carson’s Silent Spring was written in a manner that was calculated to attract mass audiences, it could only really affect public opinion if it managed to bypass the largely hostile gate keepers working for the Department of Agriculture, and/or the powerful agrochemical alliance. To this end, Carson had her book serialized in the New Yorker. But crucially, she also sought sympathetic coverage in time-based media. She achieved a significant breakthrough when, on April 3, 1963, she was interviewed by the CBS Reports television programme.
During the interview, Carson was able to explain that it was now necessary to redress the balance of information regarding pesticides: ‘we have heard a great deal about their safety, but very little about their hazards’(13). As noted by Linda Lear, the dignified and quietly competent nature of Carson’s presentation contrasted sharply with that of the chemical industry’s representative, Dr. Robert White-Stevens, who, dressed in a white lab coat, suggested that ‘If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth’ (14). According to Lear, CBS estimated an audience of between 10 and 15 million viewers for its Report. Remarkably, in a news context dominated by the funding and ideology of the agribusiness—some of the corporations even sponsored television and radio programmes—the programme not only favoured Carson’s perspectives, but in effect ‘set the agenda’ for forthcoming debates. As suggested by Lear, ‘in a single evening… [the] broadcast added the environment to the public agenda’ (15).
Nearly a decade after Carson’s Silent Spring was published, Greenpeace took this logic one step further. As I explained in an earlier post (see Making a Wave), Greenpeace was not, as its founding members suggested, simply ‘bearing witness’ to environmental destruction when its began its first campaign in the Aleutian Islands. Instead, it specialised in generating contexts in which it might be ‘witnessed bearing witness’. This two-tiered mise en scène was not only essential to the success of Greenpeace’s campaigns, but also a structural aspect of the ENGO’s practices. From this perspective, Greenpeace not only ‘needed’ the mass media, but was itself engaging in a form of mass mediation. It is unsurprising, in this sense, that the organisation eventually began to engage in a form of vertical integration by acquiring the means with which to both produce, and distribute its own images and newscasts.
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From the perspective I have just outlined, both ‘media endorsing’ perspectives such as the BBC’s guidelines, and ‘media sceptic’ perspectives such as Edwards’ and Cromwell’s are problematic in so far as they overlook a dynamic of mass mediation that is as integral to the practices of media organisations, sensu stricto, as it is to many ENGOs’ practices.
The perspective I have just outlined, and which I describe in historical context in Mediating Nature, invites environmental educators to reconsider dualistic conceptions of the relation between environmental activists and media organisations. But it also forces us to be rather sceptical about any suggestion that environmental activists are no more than the ‘victims’ of the kind of propagandistic media apparatus described by Herman and Chomsky. While aspects of that account are no doubt accurate, in the context of contemporary forms of environmental activism, they may lead to a simplification of what is arguably more accurately conceived as a complex, if fraught and contradictory, ‘co-evolution’.
An emphasis on the continuity between modern environmentalism and mass mediation should not, does not, imply a kind of natural progression towards the kind of consensus that I referred to earlier. On the contrary, it might well be expected that as societies move from recognising the reality of climate change to dealing with its consequences, there will be significant ideological battles over whom is forced to make what concessions as part of an on-going, and hegemonic dynamic of ‘negotiation’. As part of this process, there can be little doubt that at least some groups will either mobilize ‘their’ media, will pressure the more susceptible media organisations, and/or will indeed form alliances with media organisations to defend their interests. A case in point: an article published as recently as 2002 suggested that weathercasters in The Weather Channel and at least one other U.S. commercial channel were forbidden by their parent companies from using the term ‘global warming’ during their televised presentations. The justification for this was that any reference to global warming might put the broadcasters in ‘a very difficult political situation’(16).
To be sure, it may well be that the greatest challenge will involve not the conspiratorial abuses of the codes of media impartiality, but the sheer momentum of a political economy which continues to frame, however indirectly, even the most critical of representations. The momentum in question affects the Guardians and Independents as much as it does the Evening Standards and the Daily Mails: for example, even as the Guardian published articles such as Monbiot’s, it continued, indeed no doubt it had to continue to publish advertisements and whole sections on business and other ‘CO2-rich’ practices.
From this point of view, now as in the future, the problem may be as much to demystify the kinds of representations put out by Associated Newspapers, as to find a new modus operandi for the production, distribution, and reception of media representations more generally.
References
(1) G. Monbiot, ‘Did the Standard tell the truth about the Heathrow climate change camp?’ in Guardian, March 4, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/04/associatednewspapers.pressandpublishing, accessed March 22, 2008.
(2) Carson quoted in Linda Lear (1997) Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, New York: Henry Holt and Company, p. 388.
(3) Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, p. 428-429
(4) ‘Revealed: the plot to expand Heathrow’ in Sunday Times, March 9, 2008, http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/transport/article3512218.ece, accessed March 22, 2008.
(5) Murdoch’s News Corporation has recently sought to rebrand itself with advertisements emblazoned with the slogan ‘Free People Free Markets Free Thinking’.
(6) ‘Environment Agency joins Heathrow third runway critics’, in Guardian, March 13, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/mar/13/travelandtransport.theairlineindustry, accessed March 22, 2008.
(7) BBC Editorial Guidelines on Impartiality. http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/edguide/impariality/, accessed March 22, 2008.
[8] Edwards, D. [1998] ‘Can we learn the truth about the environment from the media?’, in The Ecologist, 28(1):18-22.
(9) in their book [1998] Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon.
(10) David Cromwell (2000) ‘The hack and the flack machine’ in New Internationalist, Vol. 328, http://www.newint.org/issue328/essay.htm, accessed March 22, 2008.
(11) Raymond Williams (1983) ‘Nature’, in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev. edit. London: Fontana, p. 220.
(12) Nils Lindahl Elliot (2006) Mediating Nature. London: Routledge International Library of Sociology.
(13) Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, p. 449.
(14) White-Stevens in Lear, p. 449.
(15) Lear, p. 450.
(16) K. Wilson (2002) ‘Forecasting the Future: how television weathercasters’ attitudes and beliefs about climate change affect their cognitive knowledge on the science’, in Science Communication, 24(2):246-268, p. 251.
Copyright © 2008 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved
