Benedetta Brevini

Following the Money: WikiLeaks and the Political Economy of Disclosure

In a pivotal scene in All the President’s Men, the Oscar-winning film about the Watergate scandal, Bob Woodward, an ambitious young reporter on the Washington Post, goes to meet his anonymous, shadowy, informant, “Deep Throat,” in an underground car park. Woodward hopes the encounter will offer clues to possible connections between the burglary at the Watergate Hotel and malpractice in President Nixon’s re-election campaign. He is told to “follow the money,” a trail that eventually leads to Nixon’s impeachment and ignominious departure from office.

European Commission media policy and its pro-market inclination: The revised 2009 Communication on State Aid to PSBs and its restraining effect on PSB online

This article explores the most recent policy-making of the European Commission that is shaping the online expansion of public service broadcasters. This process culminated in the renewal of the Communication on State Aid to Public Service Broadcasters (PSBs). The article argues that, whereas until 2002, the Commission was supportive of new media initiatives by PSBs, the more recent reasoning – substantiated in Communication 2009 – reveals a more restrictive approach towards PSB online. Communication 2009 sets a higher barrier to PSBs’ ventures in the new media by requiring stricter controls on PSBs’ expansion through a new ‘ex ante test’. The article concludes by highlighting the increasing weight of private broadcasters and publishers on EU policy-making.

The value of environmental communication research

Is environmental communication research returning something of value to society? Is it interdisciplinary enough? This article charts the recent rise and development of environmental communication, its successes and failures to produce public value. As the environmental crisis is the most crucial social and political issue of our time, there is a pressing need for environmental communication to engage with questions that are already familiar to scholars in media studies: questions about inequalities in power and resources – specifically among the gatekeepers influencing and shaping environmental communication – but also questions about the materiality of communication systems as environmentally hazardous machines.

From Media Policy to ‘Big’ Media Policy: The Battle for Pluralism in Australia

The year 2012 was a crucial turning point for media and journalism in many regions of the Western world. Sociologists frequently employ the term ‘critical junctures’ to explain the windows of opportunities for social change presented at specific times in history. The UK Leveson Inquiry into Culture, Practices, and Ethics of the Press was certainly one of the best examples of these ‘critical junctures’ that offered an unprecedented occasion to achieve structural reforms concerning media structures, journalism ethics and news standards. Certainly, the closure of the News of the World had a tangible effect in Australia, a country with direct links to UK media conglomerates, notably part of the Murdoch’s empire. In fact, the debate in the UK triggered the establishment in September 2011 of the Independent Media Inquiry into the Media and Media Regulation in Australia, frequently referred to as the Finkelstein Review. When the News of the World scandal spread, Australia’s Labor Government had already initiated an official appraisal of the country’s media systems with the aim to review ‘the operation of media and communications legislation in Australia and to assess its effectiveness in achieving appropriate policy objectives for the convergent era’ (Convergence Review, 2012, p. 110).

Australia: The Perpetual Battler

This chapter examines the transparency and funding of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). The organisation is Australia’s only wholly state-owned and -funded public service media body. It provides television, radio, online and mobile services, as well as publishing and licensing, live event and international development services, in Australia and overseas. The ABC has faced numerous struggles over time, including accusations of bias and suggestions that it has threatened Australia’s media plurality. It has also endured multiple cuts to its budget, mainly by conservative governments. These have significantly impacted the organisation’s operations and the content that it produces. A recent federal review also criticised the ABC’s transparency, targeting its strategic plan and breakdown of its costs in particular. This chapter outlines how the organisation has begun to respond to these latest criticisms, and how it has faced other challenges. It also details the broadcaster’s ongoing fight to achieve budgetary efficiency and ensure transparency. Ultimately, despite the ongoing setbacks that the organisation has faced, it continues its push to thrive and survive; it remains the perpetual battler.

Nothing but Truthiness: Public Discourses on the Adani Carmichael Mine in Australia

“Post-truth” has been celebrated by the Oxford and Maquarie Dictionaries as the 2016 Word of the Year, after dominating media and political discourses during the American Election campaign and the Brexit debate in the UK. Defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ (Oxford dictionaries 2016) post-truth politics has thus been identified as a hallmark of the current era in the US and UK, downplaying the fact that forms of political communication and spin that favoured feelings and emotions over policy are spreading globally. To explore some of the ways that post truth politics and “truthiness” are not only American/British phenomena, this chapter explores the way in which politicians and the media in Australia have debated the establishment of the one of the biggest coal mines in the world, the Adani Corporation’s Carmichael mine in central Queensland (Taylor and Meinshausen 2014; Amos and Swann 2015). We suggest that post-truth politics is not merely a replacement of “truth” with “lies,” but instead a complex, overlapping set of discursive strategies that work together to produce very particular political effects.

An Interview with Michael E. Mann: Fighting for Science Against Climate Change Deniers’ Propaganda

There are two critical players in the all-important game of climate change communications: journalists and scientists. In this interview, scientist Michael Mann, developer of the ‘hockey stick graph’ which revealed the dramatic rise in global temperatures from 1900, discusses the severity of the current climate crisis and looks at how scientists and media practitioners can more effectively combat climate change denialism. Mann also explains his theory, posited in his new book, of geoengineering as a possible solution to climate change.

An Interview with David Ritter: Mobilising on Climate Change—The Experience of Greenpeace

The media coverage of the COP 21 Paris agreement, as with much of the reporting on climate debates, failed to effectively communicate its significance. David Ritter, CEO of Greenpeace, examines the problems inherent in climate reporting and the global promotion of consumerism as the key to personal fulfillment. He identifies the relationship between climate change and capitalist reliance on carbon-based sources of energy. Greenpeace has frequently utilised online media to spur grassroots activism and apply pressure to large corporations, to great effect. The Australian media sector, however, presents a pernicious opposition to calls for reform; climate scholars suffer from its tendency towards anti-intellectualism, while the dominance of conservative News Corp media creates an illusion of ‘balance’ wherein science is placed on level footing with opinion.

An Interview with Kim Sheehan: Greenwashing in the Experience of the Greenwashing Index

In this interview, past president of the American Academy of Advertising Kim Sheehan defines and explains the origins of ‘greenwashing’, a PR tactic by which corporations misleadingly promote themselves as environmentally friendly. Sheehan also discusses Greenwashing Index, a website co-founded by Sheehan which allows consumers to submit and scrutinise the reliability of ‘green’ PR campaigns, and identifies the simple guide the site’s contributors can use to cut through PR spin popularly employed to greenwash corporations.

Carbon, Capitalism, Communication

Despite being written almost 200 years ago, Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein remains the best known cautionary tale of the risks and damage that may follow from human intervention in fundamental natural processes.