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Introduction: Environmental journalism
| Content Provider | Scilit |
|---|---|
| Copyright Year | 2014 |
| Description | Book Name: Environmental Journalism |
| Abstract | There are many reasons for considering environmental journalism as an academi-cally significant, challenging and valuable focus for a themed issue of Journalism Studies.Journalism about the environment and climate change sits at a complex of intersectionsbetween politics, business, science, nature and culture, in between, the individual and thecommon but also in between the local, regional and global levels. While the environmentlargely appears as local and tangible, the related issues of climate change are global andintangible. This means, that in some locations, associated risks are contemporary and veryreal, while in others, perhaps most, such risks are remote in both time and space and thusonly knowable through various representations. Such differences in perception are,however, not only linked to geographical location but also, at least to some extent, linkedto levels of income and technological development (two aspects, which together mayallow for more sustained mitigation measures). While there is a broad scientific consensuson the anthropogenic contributions to global warming, scientific knowledge on theregional impacts of global warming is still somewhat uncertain. This, along with the vastdifferences in perceptions among individuals and in between countries, make globalpolitical attempts at mitigation fraught with economical, scientific, developmental,geographical, social and cultural fault lines*as COP 15 in Copenhagen illustrated neatly. Journalism was an intimate part of establishing and negotiating such fault lines anda focus on conflict is an established journalistic approach to complex issues. Away fromglobal summits, however, climate change is more difficult for journalists to handle sincethis issue breaches some of journalism’s established foci and demarcations. Firstly, thetemporal aspect makes climate change difficult to handle journalistically; apart frommelting glaciers and extreme weather events, the issue of global warming is difficult tomake concrete, and thus the subject of news. This is somewhat linked to the fact thatenvironmental issues, at least in some measure, cut across established editorial boundariessuch as politics, business, technology, nature, culture and consumer issues. Finally, sinceclimate change is threatening to inflict great upheaval through famines, and migrationwaves, the question arises of whether traditional professional dichotomies between‘‘objective’’ and ‘‘balanced’’ versus ‘‘advocacy’’ journalism are adequate in the face of suchsocial and environmental challenges. This question is exacerbated by the fact that this isan area of reporting that is heavily dependent on journalistic translations of scientificknowledge. Taken together these aspects make environmental journalism an area ripe forclashes of various sorts. |
| Related Links | https://api.taylorfrancis.com/content/chapters/edit/download?identifierName=doi&identifierValue=10.4324/9781315829494-8&type=chapterpdf |
| Ending Page | 20 |
| Page Count | 5 |
| Starting Page | 16 |
| DOI | 10.4324/9781315829494-8 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited |
| Publisher Date | 2014-10-29 |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Subject Keyword | Book Name: Environmental Journalism Cultural Studies Climate Change Business Politics Journalism Journalistic Extreme Culture Challenges Aspect Makes |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Chapter |
