Why Did It Take So Long – for news of climate change to reach the public?
Posted by Rosemarie Rowley on May 22 2010
WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG FOR CONCERNS ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMATE CHANGE TO REACH THE PUBLIC?
Since Bobby Kennedy mentioned air pollution in his election speech before his assassination in 1968, (movie, Bobby ,Weinstein Co., 2006) it has taken almost 40 years for environmental concerns, especially global warming and its concomitant, climate change, to be highlighted in the mass media.
This essay will attempt to explore that delay, and why it has taken so long for the public to be made aware of the crisis, taking into account
•the economic model and predictable outcomes
• the political climate
• the international situation
• lack of scientific consensus
•the context of news reporting
• news values
• the nature of mass media
• effects on the viewer
• the effects of isolation
• other factors and conclusion
The tendency of the mass media in western democracies has been to reflect the dominant political ethos, that of liberal capitalism, and its predictable outcomes, therefore we can say with confidence that the most of the media reflect this ethos, and the public literarily buy into it. In these democracies, the prevalence of advertising is very marked, with the notable exception of the BBC in the UK. Advertising is specifically geared to different groups in society on a socio-economic basis, and is, of its nature, short term, and aimed at the lowest common denominator in these groups. Advertising therefore often becomes simplistic in its mass appeal. The advertisers talk down to consumers, and do not encourage questions. So perhaps the most notable effect of the mass media is to reinforce the stereotypical thinking and stereotypical situations reflected in the dominant mode, and its predictable outcomes. This does not allow for new modes of thinking or for the accommodation of significant change.
Since the last World War, there has been the added complication of the Cold War, so that means, in the conflict between the West and its capitalist institutions, and the East, and its socialist ones, the reinforcement of capitalist thought was actually emphasized and stereotyped even more in order to win and maintain adherents. Capitalism without responsibility was the norm. In the era of monetarism which occurred during the presidencies in the US of Reagan, and in the UK of Thatcher, there was a brand of capitalism advanced which took no account whatsoever of any kind of stewardship to the earth. A theory of ownership developed in which personal accountability in companies was legally abnegated. People were encouraged to spend and waste resources on a hitherto unimaginable scale. Everything was commodified. Hence the environment suffered a severe degradation during that time, as with the capitalist consumer ethic the air became polluted with chemicals from manufacturing centres and car exhausts, and carbon entered into the airstream in unprecedented waves, building up to global warming, and its concomitant, climate change. Our other great resource, water and the seas, became polluted through sewage and the use of poisonous chemicals in the home, and this may limit its future capacity to deal with higher temperatures in a situation of climate change.
It may have been, at the end the Second World War, with the explosion of the first atomic bombs, that there was a general feeling that there would be no future on planet earth, and therefore leaders who encouraged the throw away-economy were elected and held power. The vast majority took part in the social consensus of conspicuous consumption and throw-away. There were individuals and movements which from time to time registered their disquiet, such as in the 1960s, when Rachel Carson published her book “The Silent Spring”, which described how pesticides were destroying bird life; and Ralph Nader in the US tried to make car manufacturers accountable, and the hippie movement, which was initially a peace initiative. The hippy ethos was destroyed by media concentration on sensationalist drug stories, their initial peace and environmental concerns, and programmes for social justice, such as the Diggers in California, were rarely mentioned in the succeeding years without a dismissive framework.
Without the back-up of the mass media, these individuals and movements faded into insignificance until the end of the Cold War. By then, throw-away had become entrenched in the public consciousness, and people were encouraged to rival each other in the use and waste of resources.
Therefore the capitalist ethos was one of unbridled consumerism, its symbol the sexy and dangerous motor car, with its claim to private space while discharging emissions into the public space, causing a huge rise in carbon in the atmosphere. The Eastern or communist bloc fared no better, as their central planning also was reckless when dealing with the environment, and also produced waste and pollution. When the nuclear accident took place at Chernobyl, the initial reaction by the Soviet authorities was to hush the whole matter up, until some of those affected spoke to Western journalists.
There were further complications due to the Cold War polarizations of subjectivity which arrived at a solipsistic inflation of ego to compound this consumer identity. It probably was a response to the crisis situation arising out of the polarization of vastly different political agendas. In general, the western mass media in years following the Second World War reflected a narrow individualist view and were short-term.
This was even more so during a period of international tension, such as the Cold War, when larger questions and long term issues were generally not discussed. Capitalism had to be shown as a winning political system without any questions being aired which would affect production of goods. Along with the capitalist ethos was a silencing of anyone who questioned consumerism and its products. There were alternatives offered by specialist political journals and magazines, but the main media, which had mass circulation, tended to lampoon these kinds of solutions.
There was little effective concern about climate change in the groves of academe, either, what happened in this crucial era since the 1960s was that universities became over-specialized, and along with the prevalence post-modern theory, lost the idea of moral agency. There were no matching ethical systems, even if there were questions of connection with the “is” with the “ought”, an ethical position of agency held no authority, or even reward. The “death of the author” may have been a real death. Opinion was stymied, and it is only in recent years that a significant interest has been shown in theories of mass media and how it may affect on the individual and societal level.
It wasn’t until the Cold War ended, and polarizations from East/West/Them/Us ceased to be useful, in the new global economy, that trans-cultural and transnational events mattered, and gradually an awareness grew, from environmental activists such as Greenpeace in the ‘eighties, and the development of Gaia theory by James Lovelock, who had been writing much earlier, that the media took cognizance of the global situation, realizing that air and water move across geographical boundaries and what happens on a small island like Britain with its overload of carbon has on effect on islands far away, threatening to obliterate them from the planet in the cataclysm of climate change.
First formulated by Lovelock during the 1960s as a result of work for NASA concerned with detecting life on Mars, the Gaia hypothesis proposes that living and non-living parts of the earth form a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism. Named after the Greek goddess Gaia, the hypothesis postulates that the biosphere has a regulatory effect on the Earth’s environment that acts to sustain life.
While the Gaia hypothesis was readily accepted by many in the environmentalist community, it had not been widely accepted within the scientific community. Among its more famous critics are the evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins and Ford Doolittle. These (and other) critics have questioned how natural selection operating on individual organisms can lead to the evolution of planetary-scale homeostasis.
In the meantime, the mass media ignored Lovelock and his colleagues, and concentrated on populism, simultaneously running titillating stories along with hyperbolic critique of sex scandals, something which had resulted from the opening up of sexuality in the 1960s. Now people were hard at work, and dependent on the mass media for information, so they had no way of accessing stories about the environment, so the result was that the mass media worked against the long-term interests of the planet.
Context was also important during this era of sensationalism. News of environmental activists was filtered through a lens in a context of international terrorism, which had erupted in regions of territorial dispute. If environmental concerns were featured or reported, it was nearly always in the context of fear or danger, as in stories about Greenpeace (where their boat Rainbow Warrior actually was bombed off the coast of New Zealand in 1985) or in the soft or loony context of tree-huggers and hippies. Much of this reporting was to facilitate advertisers who wanted to flood the market with desirable objects like cars, to engage people with fantasies of power and sexuality, like the James Bond films, and to stifle questioning and criticism.
The environmental movement gained electoral prominence in Europe in the ‘eighties, but was slow to enter the mainstream. It wasn’t until the Stern report was published in the UK at the end of October 2006 (Stern, N. (2007)) that a scientific consensus was reached: human activity was having a deleterious effect on the planet, that the media in general, and overall, took up the question of the threat of global warming, and climate change, and made it front page news.
The climate of opinion, over the years, had been structured in a certain way. But the nature of the media itself had the most significant role to play. Firstly, the mass media offer a certain definition of reality, and this reality is constructed in different ways. The main point of media theorists is that “reality” as portrayed on television is not a true picture. The “reality” of television is quite a different reality than in the real world or in nature. In a famous study by Lang and Lang (1953) there was an early demonstration as to how the media structure reality – it gave the example of the return of General McArthur from Korea after his recall, and showed how a relatively small-scale and muted occasion was turned, by selective reporting, into something approaching a mass demonstration.
Recently, there have been theories advanced on how people receive mass communications. Studies published on the Internet have centered on the theory of Limited Capacity Theory, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LC4MP#Limited_capacity_theory
which illustrates how the media, by editing and framing, prepare a viewer to process responses. “When a reader, or viewer, who is a message processor, decides to pay attention to a message because it appeals to their interests, and they allocate resources to information processing, the controlled message engagement sub-process begins”: this becomes all the more potent when the viewer concentrates on what is contained in a frame. “When the person, a message processor, is cued automatically, and they are paying attention, the same process of allocating cognitive resources begins to elicit message processing. First, message engagement..”, which is a stimulus (a term originating in B. F. Skinner’s theories of behaviourism) …” can be seen in an approach/avoidance interaction which engages the appetitive and aversive cognitive sub-processes. In lay terms, these are basic fight or flight responses that happen in mere nanoseconds. This information then can report to sensor stores in the brain; and if it is useful, it will move to short term memory and long term memory the same way.”
Since the decades when television first came on stream, the power has rested disproportionately with the mass media controllers, and vast numbers of people were influenced directly to think what the power brokers wanted. Techniques like constant repetition meant that messages were embedded by individuals and society, as it has often been noted that if you repeat something often enough, people believe it. Thinkers like Marshall McLuhan had realized this early on, in “The Medium is the Message” in the 1960s but this had pop art and op art status, and was not taken on board in any meaningful way by the media themselves, apart from accepting the coinage of “The Global Village.” There was no attempt at self-criticism by the media, instead a conflation took place in which consumerism, and its art forms or critiques, were embedded as a further object of reification. This phase of capitalism, the reification of the consumer and person, survived as a total process, and also embedded and calcified the idea of “choice”, when in fact the viewer or viewer was responding on an automatic biological level.
The conclusion of the Lang and Lang report was that audiences perceived events in line with its framing on television rather than as it actually transpired. To sum up, the viewer is offered one frame, and therefore the critical selection process can controlled by what is framed and what is moving in it, rather than the viewer.
With the Cold War well and truly over, we could ask why people buy news so much, and still do. Some have advanced the theory that it is connected to survivor syndrome, in that it signals danger. Therefore it nearly always plays to the danger element. The negative charge of news assures us that we ourselves (we are all egotists and by nature, subjective) are safe, and allows us at the same time to empathize with victims. A long off or improbable danger does not affect us in the same way. In addition, long-range forecasting is by its nature, unpredictable. While news outlets do not attempt to anticipate newsworthy events or tragedies, when the events happen, it is reported as if it were taking place within a predictable framework, for example, when reporting the tsunami in 2004, a great deal of attention was given to holiday makers and thus struck a note within the larger public who would be planning holidays themselves.
As well as the difficulty for the viewer in processing messages about reality, it may also be a fact that news values themselves – which decide which stories will feature on the News agenda – are equally blameworthy along with the de facto mass media power itself. If we look at these we can easily understand why a slow- moving event such as environmental degradation can go unreported:
The accepted news values – i.e. what will sell on immediate impact can be categorized in a list in which these components play off each other:
Scale of events
Closeness
Clarity
Short time scale
Relevance
Consonance
Personification
Negativity
Significance
Drama and action
Hence we can understand that the environment did not make the news until flash
flooding was reported in Ireland, the tsunami occurred in Asia, and the Stern report, which carried the agreement of a large number of scientists was written and reported about in the international news media. In all cases, the scale of damage had reached epic proportions, and the drama and action involved was huge. Or, it may be that freak storms locally were newsworthy, in that accidents with trees falling, etc., were of interest to the local viewers.
It has been the case that individuals and groups tried to draw attention to the way the environment was being degraded, Friends of the Earth was founded in 1971, but these protests were not heard by the general public, because they were edited or excluded from the agenda of television programmes. News is news precisely because it is immediate, short term, and makes an impact on the here and now – and delays and omissions in reporting slow environmental degradation suffers from the “fire brigade” mentality of the news makers.
So in looking at the reasons this took so long, news values play a significant role. But there are also indications that those dissenting from the commonly held cultural view, based on ignorance, can be affected adversely.
What powerful media can do is to isolate those individuals who have a different opinion than the prevailing consensus.
Noelle-Neumann (Noelle Neumann, 1984) has examined the formation of climates of opinion by the mass media, and makes the following observations:
Society threatens deviant individuals with isolation
Individuals experience fear of isolation continually
This fear of isolation causes individuals to assess the climate of opinion
at all times
This results in affecting their behaviour in public, especially their
willingness to express, or not, their opinions openly.
This may explain why those individuals who were unhappy and uneasy about the consumerist climate of opinion did not, as a rule, come to prominence during that era. They felt marginalized and isolated, and apart from the majority in society. The media tendency to exclude individuals who question their ethos means that very many prominent thinkers during the period of consumerism had to edit their comments, with the notable exception of David Attenborough, who was protected by the BBC policy of non-advertising. He himself, in his autobiography, Life on Air (2009) has been one of the few high-profile people who went on record to express their disquiet on this subject. He has also used television in a very positive way for the environment in his celebrated wildlife programmes. The movie star Robert Redford also reported feelings of isolation when releasing his movie A River Runs Through It (Robert Redford, Director, 1992).
However, with news of environmental danger came responsibility, and recent programmes like Oprah in the U.S. has used television involvement techniques in ethical causes to educate viewers, for example, on the effects of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. A new development is to ask the audience to contribute towards global justice, engaging them in positive social action programmes like shopping to help Aids victims in Africa, taking them out of the passive mode. Time magazine has recently reported on ethical consumerism.(Time, issue dated September 21, 2009, p.33). It may be that such techniques in mass media will be useful in dealing with climate change.
In the past, our need for a predictable framework has facilitated the news corporations and their owners, but in historical terms, these mass media are very new. This means they can adapt to the longer and larger-scale global realities. Climate change is now the most pressing of concerns. What needs to be done is publicity and its management to make the public aware of our behaviour and to avoid what will be damaging for the environment. In the end, it is our responsibility for buying into a media which does not properly reflect our resources and our impact on the planet, so consumers have to be educated too.
The new media of Internet may provide a solution to ethical advertising, because in virtual space the viewer has more than one frame and can control their action, reaction and response – whereas television viewing still tends to concentrate the mind to focus on one dominant frame, which is moving. On the question of availability of information, the new media and technology has greatly facilitated the exchange of information, both in terms of time and content.
A near-consensus has been reached on global warming and climate change, and the media have featured advertisements and programmes to make energy consumers more aware of energy waste in the home, and the size of the individual or household carbon footprint – this has led to large scale measures such as keeping cars out of cities, and the efficient use of resources.
Those who have a stake in the future, like having a family, may be best at showing us how the future will affect them, and us. Perhaps we should demand a media that keeps these long term concerns on the agenda. But then, the nature of media would have to change. Its chief basis in economics would have to give way to a more socially aware, and perhaps socially controlled, managing style. However, as we learnt from the experiment with communism and socialism, having social aims of themselves do not guarantee any expression of the truth, or what matters to humanity in the long run. Therefore the onus on us is to keep ourselves informed, and support those who asks questions, even at the risk of dissenting from the norm. Because the norm we see in the media, is not the real world, which our planet earth, which is irreplaceable and demands a more responsible attitude from all of us. We badly need education on the subject. The consensus is there now, and we all have a part to play.
This essay was written for a media project at Stillorgan College of Further Education, Dublin, Spring 2007, and submitted to Media/Culture in September 2009,Sources
Movie, Bobby – Life of Robert Kennedy, Weinstein Co., 2006, DVD 2007
Stern Review on The Economics of Climate Change. Executive Summary. HM Treasury, London: http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/sternreview_index.htm
Lang et al, 2000, see also entry in Wikipedia under Limited Capacity Theory
Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann: Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion – Our Social Skin – University of Chicago Press (Aug 1984) ISBN-10: 0226589323 ISBN-13: 978-0226589329
See also under “Green Essays” link to www.rosemarierowley.ie
“The Tragedy of the Commons – Public and Private and the Culture of Waste
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