Libby Lester

Power games: environmental protest, news media and the internet

Print and electronic news media have played a central role in environmental politics for 30 years: negotiating access, shaping meanings, circulating symbols. Environmentalists have responded with strategies and tactics created for and communicated through the news media. Protest action is one such strategy that has become ‘reflexively conditioned’ to an unprecedented level in its pursuit of media attention (Cottle, 2008: 853). It is for this reason that the internet and the worldwide web have been a tantalising source of hope for activists over the past decade, offering the potential for independent information distribution devoid of the mediating effect of news journalists and the established news media industries. This article investigates and analyses how the recursive relationship between online digital ‘new media’ and print and electronic news media – or ‘old media’ – has unfolded (Jenkins, 2006), which is an important task if the precise dimensions of the power struggle occurring between environmental activists and news media sources are to be understood.

The power of the unseen: environmental conflict, the media and invisibility:

This article critically revisits the operation of ‘mediated visibility’ in the context of environmental conflict. Challenger groups have long gained access to news media and influenced political decision-makers by staging highly visible protest events that draw public attention to environmental threats and destruction. The advent of the world-wide web and digital media tools has since added to the tactical arsenal available to groups wanting to infiltrate and disrupt government and corporate networks of power. In turn, governments and corporations deploy these same tools to maintain their reputation and check opponents who oppose their activities. These developments have, we argue, produced a significant flow-on effect. The function of invisibility – or the coordinated avoidance of media communication, attention and respresentation in order to achieve political and/or social ends – is an under-examined feature of contemporary environmental politics. The case study and evidence presented here are drawn from fieldwork conducted in the Australian island state of Tasmania, and extensive content analysis of news media, social networking platforms and websites.

Lost in the Wilderness? Celebrity, Protest and the News

The deployment of celebrities is a well-established practice in environmental politics, but does the involvement of actors, singers and comedians give environmentalists an edge in the battle for positive and ongoing news coverage or simply feed contemporary anxieties and debates about the state of the public sphere? This paper attempts to understand better the interaction between celebrity, protest and the news over time by asking how celebrity functions as a form of political protest, how celebrity protest relates to changing logics in news production, and how news access for non-elite political challengers gained via celebrity is negotiated and contested. The material presented here is based on an analysis of news coverage of the 35-year-long conflict over Tasmanian wilderness and interviews with journalists, activists and government/industry public relations specialists, and thus explores textual outcomes but also behind-the-scenes production dynamics and changing political/media contexts over time. The paper finds the media acting in complex and often contradictory ways as they struggle to retain control of the news agenda. It also argues that by attending to these empirical complexities and the changing dynamics over time of the celebrity–movement–media interaction, we are better equipped to address contemporary concerns about the state of the media as public sphere.

Environmental Conflict and the Media

Has the hype associated with the «revolutionary» potential of the World Wide Web and digital media for environmental activism been muted by the past two decades of lived experience? What are the empirical realities of the prevailing media landscape? Using a range of related disciplinary perspectives, the contributors to this book analyze and explain the complicated relationship between environmental conflict and the media. They shine light on why media are central to historical and contemporary conceptions of power and politics in the context of local, national and global issues and outline the emerging mixture of innovation and reliance on established strategies in environmental campaigns. With cases drawn from different sections of the globe – Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe, Latin America, China, Japan, the Pacific Islands, Africa – the book demonstrates how conflicts emanate from and flow across multiple sites, regions and media platforms and examines the role of the media in helping to structure collective discussion, debate and decision-making.

Theorizing the enactment of mediatized environmental conflict

Contemporary ‘mediatized environmental conflict’ involves complex interactions between (i) activist strategies and campaigns, (ii) journalism practices and news reporting, (iii) formal politics and decision-making processes, and (iv) industry activities and trade. This article theorizes how these interactions occur, drawing on evidence produced by a nine-year period of investigation into environmental media practices, content and technologies. Indicative of power dynamics in a globalized world, mediatized environmental conflict is enacted by the events and negotiations that occur at the ‘switching points’ between the four identified spheres of action. The conflicting messages, representations, debates, and practices that dynamically constitute these switching points are how environmental conflicts are contested, bringing together interlocking networks of media, political, and economic power. These networks traverse the local, national, and transnational in varying degrees depending on the particular issue or site in question. The groups and decision-makers who exercise greatest influence in the midst of conflict are those able to determine what is made visible to opponents and wider publics, meaning that both ‘mediated visibility’ and ‘invisibility’ are important strategic resources in battles over the environment conducted in media saturated social worlds.

Transnational publics and environmental conflict in the Asian Century

Conflict over landscape use, resource access and environmental futures has become a central feature of contemporary political life. Increasingly, these conflicts are articulated, negotiated and potentially resolved across national boundaries and complex networks of media and communications. Within the context of intensifying pressure for resources, market opportunities and changing media practices, this article examines the multi-directional and multi-layered flows of political communication and action that are developing within the Asian region. It outlines a case of recent environmental protests targeted at Japanese and Malaysian companies involved in the procurement and sale of Australian forest products, and reveals how distant supporters are being enabled to join with those affected locally to resist development, end resource procurement and undermine growth strategies.

Soft journalism, politics and environmental risk: An Australian story

Complex environmental science issues are regularly reported by the news media in highly personalized and symbolic terms in order to make the consequences of environmental degradation and risk comprehensible to the public. This article presents a case study showing how the tension between political statements, human-interest narratives and scientific credibility in this style of reporting can undercut citizen-led claims about environmental risk factors. This tension creates discursive openings that government and industry use to deny the existence of these factors or contest their consequences. The evidence presented in support of this argument relates to episodes of Australian Story, a popular ‘soft journalism’ programme, shown on the national public service broadcaster during the 2010 Tasmanian state election campaign. The timing and content of this programme produced extensive debate across multiple mediums about environmental risks, providing insight into the relationship between politics, journalism and the contested status of environmental science knowledge claims in the news.

Species of the Month: Anti-Whaling, Mediated Visibility, and the News

Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and captain of anti-whaling ship the Steve Irwin, has emerged as one of the worlds most visible environmental protesters. This essay, based in part on a long interview with Watson in Australia in 2009, analyzes his mediated visibility and thus capacity to participate in public debate by isolating various components of his strategic activities under four themes: mediated protest, symbolic power, media practices, and celebrity. It argues that Watsons visibility involves a complex flow of information and meanings across various “old” and “new” media form, but remains reliant on news media. Thus, despite his generally astute media practices and strategies, Watsons visibility is contingent on a set of professional practices and logics unlikely to provide sustained news access or long-term legitimacy to a political “outsider.”

Big tree, small news: Media access, symbolic power and strategic intervention

The death of El Grande — Australia’s biggest tree and the world’s largest flowering plant and hardwood tree — created a powerful symbol for environmentalists challenging the destruction of native forests across Tasmania, but only outside Tasmania. In local media, the reporting of the tree’s fate remained contained and isolated from the broader environmental conflict. Using El Grande’s discovery, burning and death as a critical case study and drawing on a range of media texts and interviews with journalists, environmentalists and public relations practitioners, this article analyses the complex dynamics operating at the interface of symbolic power and news production, particularly in terms of the contest for media access and visibility by both elite and non-elite sources; the nature and successes of strategic interventions by competing sources and media themselves to enhance or limit this power; and how these various dynamics function over time.

Three challenges for environmental communication research

I want to identify three major challenges that I see for our field, and suggest that in confronting these, we are forced to reconsider how we integrate and organize the knowledge, theories, and actors that have been associated with environmental communication (EC) research in the past. As our field encourages us to foreground the local—it is, after all, specific landscapes that provide minerals, fossil fuels, timber products, or the locations for nuclear power plants, and it is communities and individuals who carry the anxieties and lived realities of damaged environments or restricted economies—I base my comments in part on research and lived experiences in Tasmania. The island state of Australia has been racked by decades of conflict over natural resource use and extractive industries. Environmental issues have led to falls of government, arrests of leading business and political figures, violence, and social and economic hardship. But two key points: The first is that Tasmania, like the rest of the world, has been rendered increasingly permeable by the Internet, global environmental risks and concerns, and transnational politics and decision-making. Localized threats and concerns coalesce symbolically into discourses of global risk, and discourses of global risk are synthesized for decision-making on a local, regional, and international scale. The second is that the Tasmanian conflict is mild in comparison to many of those being played out in developing countries, as well as in the poorer and more disadvantaged regions of some first-world nations. We know, for example, that environmental reporting is now one of the main reasons for violence against journalists around the world (Reporters without Borders, 2009). We see activists charged with crimes disproportionately with their actions. Science has been scandalized, silenced, and delegitimized, often by national governments. I suggest that the field is facing not only intellectual and methodological challenges that we should be eager to embrace, but also political challenges that could impact on our own legitimacy and capacity to contribute to environmental debate and policy. These also require our combined effort.