Mass Media and Environment Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Mass media is typically defined as a form of technology (including radio, film, and television, but also encompassing newspapers, magazines, and book publishing, as well as advertising, marketing, and public relations) or institutional organization (Time-Warner, RCA, BBC, AOL, Al-Jazeera, and so on). Beyond these narrow definitions, mass media also encompasses shifting cultural forms shaping human perception and possibilities for social change. Mass media therefore simultaneously includes technical, institutional, and cultural dimensions. This broad conception is required to understand how media shape contemporary human/environment conditions, including representations of nature, popular perceptions of environmental issues, and public opinion on phenomena ranging from swimming with dolphins to global warming.

Modern Environmentalism and Mass Media Coverage

Many of the founding events of modern environmentalism were irrevocably shaped by mass media. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring is a common touchstone for histories of environmentalism, but its initial serialization in a popular magazine (The New Yorker) and use in a CBS television expose of the pesticide industry is crucial to a proper appraisal of its influence. Though it is hardly the first example of popular nature writing influencing attitudes and opinions regarding environmental advocacy, Silent Spring signaled the significance of mass media as a site for advancing environmental social change. Less than a decade later, subsequent events were not merely affected by media coverage but often designed as “media events” aiming to refigure human perceptions of nature and provoke action against the ill effects of industrialism. For example, Earth Day celebrations are public protest events designed to produce an agenda-setting effect, whereby prominent media coverage moves issues onto the public and political agenda. Prominent North American news coverage of the first Earth Day in 1970 was followed by increased public support for environmental protection, improved opinion polling on such issues, broad national environmental protection policies, and new political priorities, all of which underscored the importance of mass media as a tool for environmental change, while ensuring future conflict with antienvironmental institutions on its public terrain.

Greenpeace was probably the first environmental organization to explicitly design publicity strategies on the basis of mass media theory. Whereas the 1970 Earth Day was announced with a full-page newspaper advertisement, Greenpeace created dramatic coverage through direct confrontation with powerful industries. Finding inspiration in 1960s media guru Marshall McLuhan, images of environmental confrontation were released as a series of “mind bombs,” or visual imagery triggering emotional response and support for issues usually obfuscated in abstruse regulatory language. These provocative conflicts were staged less to stop whalers, loggers, or nuclear testing than to create compelling images for mass media dissemination. As Kevin Deluca’s important 1999 study made evident, these moments of radical confrontation were not romantically quixotic or irrational attacks on an impervious industrial system, but effectively measured tactics for conducting “image politics” in an increasingly televised or screened world.

More radical groups such as Earth First! and Earth Liberation Front (ELF) adopted new media as organization tools, finding in internet technology a medium well suited to their highly decentralized and antihierarchical style. Their direct action politics generally take the form of “monkey wrenching,” a practice characterized across a wide continuum of frames ranging from harmless prank to ecoterrorism. Monkey wrenching is small-scale, low budget, nonviolent industrial and economic sabotage, including such activities as putting sand in gas tanks, billboard graffiti, tree spiking, and sport utility vehicle vandalism. Similar to the early radicalism of Greenpeace, the goal is mainstream media attention and public perception of natural destruction, not a belief that damage to property will suffice to halt industrial-scale exploitation. Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, provided inspiration for the practice and gave expression to desires for new forms of environmental resistance, which proponents often conceive as an individualist or anarchist form of civil disobedience.

Critics associate monkey wrenching with forms of political terrorism, a view Michael Crichton extrapolates into a generalized state of paranoid anxiety in his 2004 novel, State of Fear, where wellfunded, globally coordinated ecoterrorists stage a media-friendly tsunami in support of climate change activism. What remains clear in this broad range of characterizations is that, as Tim Lukes notes, “the whole design of monkey wrenching perhaps can be traced back to symbolic battles over environmentalism’s image in the media.”

As Greenpeace adopted a more conventional organizational structure in the 1990s, it came to rely less on McLuhanist principles than social marketing and fundraising techniques to the extent that it, like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), is among the most recognized logos globally and a forerunner of what Naomi Klein has called “lifestyle branding.” Lifestyle branding is the idea that identity, values, and lifestyle are sold more readily than actual commodities and that successful brands stretch across any number of actual products or issues, as the Canadian WWF recent brand-stretching into climate change issues indicates.

The use of attention-getting techniques employed in advertising and public relations to advance consumer ideologies has raised concerns regarding the appropriate means by which environmental goals should be achieved. Given that scientists, politicians, and activists must accommodate to prevailing media conventions in order to be heard at all, or “play by the rules of the game,” does environmental crisis at times require or justify hyperbole and exaggeration? At what point do well-intentioned calls to recognize the urgency of environmental problems lapse into unwarranted fear appeals? As environmental organizations rely increasingly on fund-raising and publicity tactics typical of marketing industries, revelation of the use of such mainstream commercial techniques easily helps depict environmental groups as manipulative or propagandistic.

Controversial examples include a number of documentary-style films attacking Greenpeace, including Survival in the High North, which claim the organization utilizes propaganda methods, falsifications, and unseemly fund-raising in their campaigns. Bjorn Lomborg, in The Skeptical Environmentalist, echoes this antienvironmental refrain in linking proenvironmental public opinion to poor journalism and manipulative media.

As environmentalists claim that mass media express systemic antienvironmental bias, whether through outright exclusion, trivialization of issues, or “green washing,” where consumerism is celebrated as the solution not the problem, questions about the role of mass media in shaping public opinion and environmental activism remain strenuously contested. Answers to these questions fall into three broad categories: (1) mass society and mass culture; (2) media reinforcement, dependency, and cultivation theory; and (3) framing and problem formulation distortions.

Mass Society and Mass Culture

Mass society theory hypothesizes significant and direct effects for mass media content on public opinion, behavior, and culture. Largely a product of the 1920s-30s, with its innovations in mass media technology, propaganda technique, and the birth of modern advertising and public relations agencies, this line of thinking expresses concerns over mass media as tools for engineering consent and conformity. Modernization is often characterized as social transformation in which traditions dissolve, political and commercial power is centralized, and mass production stamps out a conformist, consumer society. As traditional community ties dissolve, alienated individuals become susceptible to control through mass mediated opinion management techniques, an indication that the instrumental intelligence evident in our technological domination of nature also seeks disciplinary control of human beings, though less through direct coercion than a debased popular culture.

Genuine insights in this tradition of thinking tend to get lost in the exaggerations of ironic skeptics and romantics alike. However, the connection between domination of nature and of humans, the opening rift between urban and rural sensibilities, and the provocative suggestion that environmental problems are simply intractable given the basic framework and institutions of industrial society admirably refuses easy accommodation to the truisms of consumer culture. The presence of some 75,000 significant dams in the United States as markers of progress and models for the world remains a visible reminder of the role of mass communication in equating progress with industrial and engineering development.

Media Reinforcement, Dependency, and Cultivation Theory

Reinforcement and dependency theories suggest media influence is expressed indirectly through the broader social system in which mass media find their role and is contingent on the extent to which we depend on them, such as in times of natural disaster. Media are contributory, not causal, factors reinforcing existing conditions along with other mainstream social institutions, such as the home, school, and church. Post-1960s evaluations tend to view this reinforcement function critically, as ideological or hegemonic, particularly as the popularity of television demands more weight be accorded its socializing or cultural influence. Cultivation theories have emphasized this point in arguing mass media provide a systemic source of socialization through storytelling that is thoroughly industrialized and bent to consumerist ends, while excluding representations of nature or “symbolically annihilating” environmental concerns. The main claim is that a small but pervasive, steady, directional, measurable, and independent contribution for television’s influence on culture is observable and socially significant, in much the way a few degrees centigrade shift in mean temperature can severely impact local ecosystems. James Shanahan and his collaborators have built on this tradition to suggest heavy television viewers have less environmental knowledge, concern, and willingness to pay for protections, while directly challenging skeptics such as Lomborg on their claims about mass media effect.

Framing and Problem Formulation Distortions

Most research in this tradition focuses on the attention and framing given to specific environmental issues. One popular conceptualization of this process is Anthony Downs’s (1972) “issue attention cycle,” which suggests public perception of environmental crisis “does not reflect changes in real conditions as much as it reflects the operation of a systematic cycle of heightening public interest and then increasing boredom with major issues.” Downs hypothesized a five-stage cycle through which environmental concern would pass: pre-problem, alarmed discovery and enthusiasm, realization of cost of resolution, gradual decline of intense public interest, and a post-problem stage, where issues reemerge only spasmodically.

Today, such conceptualization appears flawed in failing to acknowledge the specificity of environmental issues and too blunt given the results of more sustained study of mass media and public policy fields. Agenda-setting theory has proven important in finding that as media cover and attribute importance to an issue, through formal features such as story placement and amount of coverage, they alter public and political/policy agendas. Such theories strive to explain why some issues receive attention and, more importantly, how problems are defined and how possibilities for their solution often narrow to suit preexisting social institutions. Though there is considerable empirical support for such research, particularly regarding measurement and relationships of media and public agenda, the effect varies with respect to specific issues, the sorts of media employed, and the type of coverage, particularly the way concerns are framed. For example, vivid imagery tends to undercut agenda-setting power in focusing attention on people or unique characteristics rather than on underlying problems.

Continuing Problems

Those seeking to understand the relationship between mass media, public opinion, and environmental issues face two broad problems: (1) the nature of contemporary environmental problems, and (2) significant innovations in communication media.

First, contemporary formulations of environmental problems have expanded considerably in terms of their spatial-temporal scale, their complexity, and the diffuseness of their consequences, all of which make their adequate representation more difficult. The familiar symbols of environmental destruction in the 1960s and 1970s, such as burning rivers, dead lakes, razed forests, and mushroom clouds were easily represented and regionally delimited, with relatively clear causes for public opinion and policy regulation to address. Environmental problems today span the globe, stretch across generations, and remain largely invisible to common modes of perception. How does one effectively represent parts per billion of arsenic in drinking water, a gigaton of atmospheric carbon, or a critical oceanic desalinization point?

The problem formulation/resolution processes of mass media are particularly ill suited to mediating such environmental issues. Entertainment, educational, and news media alike tend toward dramatic representation and spectacle at the expense of ordinary, everyday engagement. Documentary films and tourist promotion tend to situate nature as spectacle, for spectators, which implies a stark dualism between humans and their natural world while routinely obliterating alternative and participatory engagements with nature from consideration. Such media continue belief in progressive technical domination and control of nature for human enjoyment, setting the stage for those converse instances of dramatic spectacle: natural disaster and catastrophe. Portrayals of disaster in Hollywood film and broadcast news are increasingly shaped by imperatives to capture attention and entertain, resulting in a vastly simplified framing of environmental crisis to the point these representations say more about narrative and journalistic production conventions than anything else.

In Hollywood film, environmental issues are portrayed as personalized conflicts between good and evil. This produces a simplified image of the complex and ambiguous process of claims making and responsibility attribution, while problem resolution takes place through heroic individual action, neatly tying up loose ends. In news media, problem formulation is similarly simplified. With the growth of 24-hour news and cable, news is now ever-present, continually casting events of the day into facile problem formats suiting television conventions like dramatic visualization, brevity, topicality, narrative coherence, blame, and action over criteria of multifaceted environmental appraisal.

The consequences of such distortion are most evident in coverage of natural disasters, where human/nature dualisms and “man versus nature” frames disguise the interaction of sociopolitical structures and natural processes. Failure to properly formulate the role of social policies in shaping structures of human vulnerability to disasters such as flood, fire, earthquake, and hurricane greatly impedes proper disaster policy analysis and the role of media therein.

Eric Klinenberg’s 2002 book-length study of a single heat wave brilliantly elucidates the consequences of mass media failures to properly formulate and frame environmental crises. Heat waves are among the most consistently dangerous and well-understood environmental phenomena, easily predictable and ameliorated, yet, unlike flooding, they are difficult to visualize, affecting the most vulnerable in society without the widespread property damage images generally accompanying representation of disaster. As Klinenberg concluded in his analysis of the 1995 Chicago heat wave, which killed over 700 people, “several of the most probing and insightful accounts were overshadowed by prominent and sensational photographs, dramatic but misleading headlines, and false political debates that obscured the social aspects of the disaster.”

The second set of problems concerns new information and communication technologies (ICTs), which have irrevocably changed the nature of mass media. Just as television altered the workings of print news and advertising, so digital media and internet access has transformed the relationship between mass media and society, creating new possibilities for perception and political organization. Optimistic proponents celebrate the interactive nature and participatory possibilities of new media, in providing near-instantaneous access to information on a vast array of issues and events, such as Scorecard, a regionalized pollution information site (www.scorecard.org) or Green Media Toolshed, which provides software and support for media components of environmental campaigns (www.greenmediatoolshed.org).

Other observers suggest answers to the problem of representing contemporary environmental problems might be found in the broad array of new visualization techniques ICTs offer, such as remote sensing, geographical information systems (GIS), and climate change modeling. At present, however, these gains are restricted largely to expert research tools. Their use in contemporary mass mediation tends to produce “chart junk” (visually appealing, scientific looking, but meaningless or misleading representations of data) and “data smog” (vastly increased production and distribution of unwanted and misunderstood information claiming our attention) as two consequences of decreasing costs and increasing availability of these media technologies.

More sober critics note a continuing Western bias to the global reach of news and advertising, as the same commodity orientation of mass media now characterizes the digital ones and zeros of these deregulated and privatized communication tools. As advertising-funded Western consumer media systems increasingly challenge subscription or tax-based public ones, observers remain genuinely concerned whether the digital extension of global advertising will contribute negatively to the magnitude and intensity of current environmental problems.

Bibliography:

John Besley and James Shanahan, “Skepticism about Media Effects Concerning the Environment: Examining Lomborg’s Hypothesis,” Society and Natural Resources (v.17, 2004);
Graham Chapman et , Environmentalism and the Mass Media: The NorthSouth Divide (Routledge, 1997);
Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear (Metropolitan Books, 1998);
Kevin Deluca, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (Guilford Press, 1999);
Anthony Downs, “Up and Down with Ecology: The Issue-Attention Cycle,” Public Interest (v.28, 1972);
David Ingram, Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema (University of Exeter Press, 2000);
Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2002);
Gary Kroll, “The ‘Silent Springs’ of Rachel Carson: Mass Media and the Origins of Modern Environmentalism,” Public Understanding of Science (v.10/4, 2001);
Tim Lukes, Ecocritique (University of Minneapolis Press, 1997);
Dan Philippon, “Nature on Screen,” Review of Communication (v.2/3, 2002).