Anita Howarth

PARTICIPATORY POLITICS, ENVIRONMENTAL JOURNALISM AND NEWSPAPER CAMPAIGNS

This article explores the extent to which approaches to participatory politics might offer a more useful alternative to understanding the role of environmental journalism in a society where the old certainties have collapsed, only to be replaced by acute uncertainty. This uncertainty not only generates acute public anxiety about risks, it has also undermined confidence in the validity of long-standing premises about the ideal role of the media in society and journalistic professionalism. The consequence, this article argues, is that aspirations of objective reportage are outdated and ill-equipped to deal with many of the new risk stories environmental journalism covers. It is not a redrawing of boundaries that is needed but a wholesale relocation of our frameworks into approaches better suited to the socio-political conditions and uncertainties of late modernity. The exploration of participatory approaches is an attempt to suggest one way this might be done.

The weakest link in existing studies: media–government risk interactions

This article argues that media–government interactions are critical to the trajectory of risk debates. These interactions are dynamic, entailing multifaceted shifts in responses and counter responses – positions, arguments/discourses/representations and actions – during the course of a scare. An exploration of such dynamics in the political–media complex is likely to tell us much about how their shifting relationship, roles and engagements influence the trajectory of different risk debates. With this in mind, this article undertakes a systematic and critical evaluation of the extent to which six existing risk frameworks are capable of capturing these interactional dynamics. The six analysed were moral panic, social amplification of risk, advocacy coalition framework, discourse coalition framework, social representation/cultivation analysis and ‘circuit’ frameworks. What this evaluation found was a media/policy centrism that undermines a study of both; problematic conceptualizations of communication and hence interactions; and relatively rigid research designs that facilitate a tracing of the contours of a debate but not the interactions within it. The article concludes that there is an urgent need for new frameworks better equipped to capture the interactional dynamics of risk in the political–media complex and it suggests some criteria that might inform such a development.

Constructing the Eastern European Other: The Horsemeat Scandal and the Migrant Other

Abstract The Horsemeat scandal in the UK in 2013 ignited a furore about consumer deception and the bodily transgression of consuming something so alien to the British psyche. The imagination of the horse as a noble and mythic figure in British history and sociological imagination was invoked to construct the consumption of horsemeat as a social taboo and an immoral proposition in the British media debates. This paper traces the horsemeat scandal and its media framing in the UK. Much of the aversion to horsemeat was intertextually bound with discourses of immigration, the expansion of the EU and the threat in tandem to the UK. Food as a social and cultural artefact laden with symbolic meaning and national pride became a platform to construct the ‘Other’ – in this case the Eastern European Other. The media debates on the horsemeat scandal interwove the opening up of the EU and particularly UK to the influx of Eastern European migration. The horsemeat controversy in implicating the Eastern Europeans for the contamination of the supply chain became a means to not just construct the ‘Other’ but also to entwine contemporary policy debates about immigration. This temporal framing of contemporary debates enables a nation to renew and contemporise its notions of ‘otherness’ while sustaining an historic social imaginary of itself.

A ‘superstorm’: when moral panic and new risk discourses converge in the media

There has been a proliferation of risk discourses in recent decades but studies of these have been polarised, drawing either on moral panic or new risk frameworks to analyse journalistic discourses. This article opens the theoretical possibility that the two may co-exist and converge in the same scare. I do this by bringing together more recent developments in moral panic thesis, with new risk theory and the concept of media logic. I then apply this theoretical approach to an empirical analysis of how and with what consequences moral panic and new risk type discourses converged in the editorials of four newspaper campaigns against GM food policy in Britain in the late 1990s. The article analyses 112 editorials published between January 1998 and December 2000, supplemented with news stories where these were needed for contextual clarity. This analysis shows that not only did this novel food generate intense media and public reactions; these developed in the absence of the type of concrete details journalists usually look for in risk stories. Media logic is important in understanding how journalists were able to engage and hence how a major scare could be constructed around convergent moral panic and new risk type discourses. The result was a media ‘superstorm’ of sustained coverage in which both types of discourse converged in highly emotive mutually reinforcing ways that resonated in a highly sensitised context. The consequence was acute anxiety, social volatility and the potential for the disruption of policy and social change.

Contamination, deception and ‘othering’: The media framing of the horsemeat scandal

ABSTRACT Food and consumption practices are cultural symbols of communities, nations, identity and a collective imaginary which bind people in complex ways. The media framed the 2013 horsemeat scandal by fusing discourses beyond the politics of food. Three recurrent media frames and dominant discourses converged with wider political debates and cultural stereotypes in circulation in the media around immigration and intertextual discourse on historical food scandals. What this reveals is how food consumption and food-related scandals give rise to affective media debates and frames which invoke fear of the other and the transgression of a sacred British identity, often juxtaposing ‘Britishness’ with a constructed ‘Otherness’.

Communicating the ‘migrant’ other as risk: space, EU and expanding borders

Forced migration and border spaces as fault lines posing risks to society through the notion of ‘Othering’, remain under-explored in risk literature. With Europe facing its biggest humanitarian crisis with forced migration and displacement due to conflict zones, the borders of the European Union have received renewed attention in media. Refugees and the displaced are often depicted as ‘migrants’ and are seen as transgressing borders as illegitimate entities. Although increasing attention has been paid to border patrol and issues of securitization since 9/11, the ‘migrant’ body as ‘risky body’ in political and policy discussions is under-conceptualized and theorized in risk literature. We examine political discourses of the UK Government to discern how the migrant and the expanding borders of the EU are framed as forms of societal and economic risk and equally how these are mitigated with and through the discourse of space and borders. We take a constructionist approach to the ‘migrant’ problem in the EU and UK where risk is socially constructed through political discourse.

Hunger Hurts: The Politicization of an Austerity Food Blog

Austerity food blogs have become prominent as household food budgets have become tighter, government finances constrained, and an ideology of austerity has become dominant. The British version of austerity privileges reducing government spending by cutting welfare benefits, and legitimizes this through individual failure explanations of poverty and stereotypes of benefit claimants. Austerity food blogs, written by those forced to live hand to mouth, are a hybrid form of digital culture that merges narratives of lived experience, food practices and political commentary in ways that challenge the dominant views on poverty. The popular blog A Girl Called Jack disrupts the austerity hegemony by breaking the silence that the stigma of poverty imposes on the impoverished and by personalizing poverty through Jack Monroes narratives of her lived experience of it, inviting the readers pity and refuting reductionist explanations of the causes of poverty. Monroe also challenges austerity through practices derived through her personal knowledge gained during her struggle to survive and eat healthily on i¾£10-a-week food budget. This combination of narrative and survival practices written evocatively and eloquently resonate powerfully with readers; however the response to Monroes blog highlights a deep uneasiness in British society over growing levels of poverty, and deep divisions over who is responsible for addressing it; and more fundamentally, over identifying and defining the modern poor and modern poverty.

Genetically Modified Organisms and European Journalism

Critics have accused much of the newspaper coverage in Western Europe of being sensationalist, biased, and opinion-driven. Studies of press reporting or journalistic understandings of coverage confirm this and suggest that it either represented a partisan departure from the standards of objective reporting expected in some normative models of journalism. Or, they present it as consistent with the nature of new risks where the science is uncertain, the effects unknown and the role of the journalist is to shine a “spotlight” on this. This chapter argues that when presented with two conflicting accounts of the benefits or risks of genetically modified agri-food journalists had different journalistic traditions to draw on in deciding how to respond. The dominant American journalist valorizes journalistic objectivity in the sense of dispassionate, impartial, fact-driven reporting, and the Continental journalists valorize interpretation and commentary over facts. The choices that the news outlets made was shaped not only by their ideological stance, but also by the particular context in which genetically modified organisms were introduced and journalists were operating their understanding of objectivity and the relationship between news and facts as well as the particular challenges that contested science posed for reporting on the debate.

Mobile Devices and Recording in the Classroom: A Survey of Policy in UK Higher Education Institutions

Mobile technologies such as tablets, iPads, laptops, netbooks as well as mobile phones with internet connectivity and recording features present new challenges to the academy. In the age of convergence and with the encoding of several features into mobile telephony, private spaces of the classroom can be reconfigured through the mediation of technologies. In most cases, existing rules and regulations of higher education institutions do not comprehensively address these challenges. The introduction of new technologies into the classroom has been often framed historically as vital and relevant for a progressive academic society or as part of a national imperative to transform the ways in which the authors access and engage with knowledge. This paper surveys British universities to examine how they govern the phenomenon of recording content through mobile technologies. The results reveal a pervasive use of mobile devices in UK universities and clear divergences in approaches to enacting mobile device-specific policies to govern the usage of these technologies.

Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization

Academic and activist interest in movements against corporate globalisation was boosted by vivid media images of protest and resistance during G-8 summit meetings in Seattle, Barcelona, and Genoa. Most of the subsequent literature has focused on the visible stages of resistance covered by the media. Spotting a gap, Juris asks how the Barcelona-based anti-corporate Movement for Global Resistance (MRG) operated during its ‘submerged and invisible’ stages (p. 5); how during these periods the Catalan-based movement constructed global networks with like-minded movements; and how networking