CPT737: Sustainability in PracticeSession 7

Climate change and trust in information

Richard Cowell, cowellrj@cf.ac.uk,Room 1.76, ext. 76684

Today’s session:

• A short ‘lecture’ on the mass media and the environment

• Video clip

• Focus groups, with your news clippings

Mass media & the environment:

• Increasing dependence on other actors to make ’visible’ modern, global environmental problems

• Growing dependence on the mass media to ‘represent’ environmental issues

• Appears to be strongly true of climate change

Signals and noise. Mass-media coverage of climate change in the USA and the UK, Maxwell T Boykoff & S Ravi Rajan, 2007, EMBO Report 8(3), 207-211.

Not a neutral source

Organisational routines (Rydin and Pennington):

• Predictable stories, repeated sources, use of existing formats, or particular angles

Dominant ‘news values’ (Smith):• Emphasis on conflict and tension, novelty,

individuals (goodies and baddies), preference for highly visual stories

2007 report from IPPR, ‘Warm Words II’

Criticises dominant ‘climate change discourse’• Alarmism - constant use of apocalyptic

visions present a ‘counsel of despair’• Confusing messages – ‘common sense’ used

to argue against scientific consensus• Rhetorical scepticism – science is bad,

dangers hyped• Techno-optimism – arguing that technology

can solve the problem; trivial solutions

All rather disempowering?

But also need to understand ‘consumption’ of media messages

• Don’t fall into the ‘deficit model’ of public information

• People actively negotiate the information they are bombarded with, both individually and socially

• See work by Jacqui Burgess

Video

‘Get Acclimatised’ Armstrong and Miller for the BBC

With your newspaper clippings

• How does it represent climate change?

• What sources of information does it use? Are they seen as credible?

• What if anything does it imply about who is responsible for climate change?

• Does it make YOU feel able to do anything?