Media, Culture, and the Environment
Media, Culture, and the Environment
Media, Culture and the Environment provides an accessible introduction to key issues and debates surrounding the media politics of risk assessment and the environment. Anderson looks at nature as contested terrain and reveals how news sources use it to compete for our emotions and attention. She shows how framings of risk in relation to the environment are influenced by social, political, and cultural factors, but she also rejects extreme versions of social constructionism.
The book moves beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries by synthesizing recent debates in cultural theory and media studies with key developments in human geography. It offers an in-depth analysis of pressure politics and environmental lobbying groups, while examining the production, transmission and negotiation language of news discourse. The examples, drawn from both Europe and North America, include the tremendous headline controversies over oil spills and killing of baby seals. Difficult issues, clearly surveyed and incisively presented, make this book essential reading for anyone interested in how and why journalists handle environmental news in the ways they do.
Introduction
Environmental issues
Ecology and social theory
Environmentalism and the news media
Cultural, spatial and temporal contexts
Social constructionism
Structure of the book
Further reading
1. Pressure politics and the news media
Introduction
Media theory
Conceptualizing the role of the media
Public arenas and issue entrepreneurs
Source strategies
Summary
Suggested furter reading
2. News production
Introduction
News production perspectives
Biases and constraints
Summary
Suggested further reading
3. The environmental lobby
Introduction
Defining social movements
Two competing traditions
The rise of the green movement in Western Europe and the USA
A new politics?
Evidence for the rise of a broad-based environmental movement
Explanations for the rise of environmentalism
Summary
Suggested further reading
4. News and the social construction of the environment
Introduction
Risk and the environment as a social construct
Media framing of risk and the environment
Explanations of story selection
Summary
Suggested further reading
5. Contested ground: news sources and the media
Introduction
A convergence of approaches
The background
The agenda-setting role of the popular press
The seals story as an issue threshold for environmental awareness
The agenda-building role of sources
Summary
Suggested further reading
6. Mediating the environment
Introduction
Live Aid
Media practitioners' views of the audience
Public opinion and news media representations of environmental issues
Texts and readers
Circuit of communication
Competing discourses about nuclear power
Environmental education and cultural values
Summary
Suggested further reading
Conclusion
References
Index
