Journalism and Climate Crisis
Journalism and Climate Crisis: Public Engagement, Media Alternatives recognizes that climate change is more than an environmental crisis. It is also a question of political and communicative capacity.
This book enquires into which approaches to journalism, as a particularly important form of public communication, can best enable humanity to productively address climate crisis. The book combines selective overviews of previous research, normative enquiry (what should journalism be doing?) and original empirical case studies of environmental communication and media coverage in Australia and Canada. Bringing together perspectives from the fields of environmental communication and journalism studies, the authors argue for forms of journalism that can encourage public engagement and mobilization to challenge the powerful interests vested in a high-carbon economy facilitative and radical roles particularly well-suited to alternative media and alternative journalism. Ultimately, the book argues for a fundamental rethinking of relationships between journalism, publics, democracy and climate crisis.
This book will interest researchers, students and activists in environmental politics, social movements and the media.
Robert A. Hackett is Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver and a co-founder of NewsWatch Canada, Media Democracy Days and OpenMedia.ca. His research interests include media democratization; critical news analysis; and social movements, peace and media. Recent collaborative books include Expanding Peace Journalism and Remaking Media.
Susan Forde is Director of the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research and Associate Professor of Journalism at Griffith University, Australia. Books include Challenging the News and Developing Dialogues (with Meadows and Foxwell). Until 2002 she was a journalist in the alternative, independent and Indigenous media, including editing the Indigenous newspaper Land Rights Queensland.
Shane Gunster is Associate Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University and a research associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. His teaching and research interests focus upon news media coverage, advocacy and engagement around the politics of energy and climate change.
Kerrie Foxwell-Norton is Senior Lecturer in Journalism and Media Studies at Griffith University, Australia. Her research investigates the role of local media and communities in addressing global environmental issues, and her key interest is in the intersections between media, policy and the environment. She is the co-author of Developing Dialogues (with Forde and Meadows).
Communication and Society
Series Editor: James Curran
This series encompasses the broad field of media and cultural studies. Its main concerns are the media and the public sphere: on whether the media empower or fail to empower popular forces in society; media organizations and public policy; the political and social consequences of media campaigns; and the role of media entertainment, ranging from potboilers and the human-interest story to rock music and TV sport.
For a complete list of titles in this series, please see: https://www.routledge.com/series/SE0130
News and Politics
The Rise of Live and Interpretive Journalism
Stephen Cushion
Gender and Media
Representing, Producing, Consuming
Tonny Krijnen and Sofie Van Bauwel
Misunderstanding the Internet
Second Edition
James Curran, Natalie Fenton and Des Freedman
Africas Media Image in the 21st Century
From the Heart of Darkness to Africa Rising
Edited by Mel Bunce, Suzanne Franks and Chris Paterson
Comparing Political Journalism
Edited by Claes de Vreese, Frank Esser and David Nicolas Hopmann
Media Ownership and Agenda Control
The Hidden Limits of the Information Age
Justin Schlosberg
First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2017 Robert A. Hackett, Susan Forde, Shane Gunster, Kerrie Foxwell-Norton
The right of Robert A. Hackett, Susan Forde, Shane Gunster, Kerrie Foxwell-Norton to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-95038-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-95039-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-66873-4 (ebk)
Typeset in New Times Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
A book of this scope, with four co-authors in two continents, would not have been possible without many contributors. We are indebted to Michael Meadows, now retired from Griffith University, for bringing us together in the first place.
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of Griffith University through the Griffith-SFU Travel Collaborative Grant program which enabled Forde and Foxwell-Norton to visit Vancouver in 2014. Visits by Hackett and Gunster to Griffith University to work on the manuscript in 2016 were fully financed by the Short Term Visiting Research Fellowship Scheme through the Arts, Education and Law Group. Additional funding for data collection and the preparation of the related chapters was also provided by Griffith Universitys Centre for Social and Cultural Research and the former School of Humanities.
Much of the empirical research in British Columbia was supported through the Climate Justice Project of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) and the University of British Columbia, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) particularly, a project/module entitled The climate of discussion: News media and the politics of climate change in British Columbia, led by Kathleen Cross with Shannon Daub, Gunster and Hackett as co-investigators, and with research assistance from Marcelina Piotrowski, Sibo Chen, Helena Krobath and Madison Trusolino. Particular projects/modules also received funding from the SSHRC, and from the work/study program, the Vice-President Research, the Dean of Graduate Studies, and the Dean of Communication, Art and Technology, at Simon Fraser University.
Hackett acknowledges research assistance from undergraduate students at SFU. Over several years, Ashley Adams, Sahib Bhatia, Joey Chopra, Mariam Faqeri, Kathryne Gravestock, Rohini Grover, Kavya Joseph, Nicole Keith, Kevin Keyhoe, Wendee Lang, David Lazenby, Vojtech Sedlak, Josh Tabish, Maegan Thomas, Sara Wylie and Rebecca Visser helped to keep pace with the burgeoning research literature in alternative media, media democratization and environmental communication. Foxwell-Norton acknowledges research assistance from Terri Lethlean for the data gathered in . The Australian authors also acknowledge (and utilized) the comprehensive literature research work from the Canadian-based research assistants working with Hackett.