Twenty years on: covering climate change
I wonder what the long-term impact will be on my personality of writing about climate change.
I am writing a chapter for a book provisionally entitled ‘Media and Climate Change’, an academic text, and my focus is on the reporting of the policy texts: how the Kyoto Protocol, IPCC reports, UK Climate Bill, etc, have been received and dealt with in the press, and what impact this has had on effective action.
It can be upsetting and depressing work. It would be fair to say I’m struggling this week. One example why: read this intro to a news story I was anaylsing:
SCIENTISTS, politicians and journalists are part of a conspiracy to predict catastrophe through global warming, a Channel 4 programme suggested last night. The programme claimed that disparate groups were making this claim for their own reasons and presented data allegedly demolishing the greenhouse theory. Scientists from the Meteorological Office meet today to decide whether to complain to the Independent Broadcasting Authority.
Sounds familiar? The Great Global Warming Swindle from last year, right? No. This was The Greenhouse Conspiracy, broadcast by Channel 4, which I found while researching media coverage of the first IPCC report in 1990. Watch it on Youtube.
Upsetting and depressing. We’ve gone around in circles. And as an IPSOS-MORI report released this weekend and covered by Juliette Jowitt in the Observer, the public continue to be confused by the messages they receive through the media about the science.
How does this happen? This quote is from the report itself: Read more
The cultural economy of the luxury brand
Yesterday I looked at the copy content in the launch of Standpoint, the new politics/business monthly magazine edited by former Telegraph associate editor Daniel Johnson, with launch articles from a number of neocon names and Telegraph writers that did nothing to support Johnson’s claim that it is a magazine of both the Left and Right.
The launch of Standpoint and its claims to bipartisan intellectual curiosity stirrred some thoughts around the rise of the “intellectual magazine” in the recent couple of years, and what this is saying about both the magazine market and the economic and political context in which magazines operate. My view is that the recent glut of “intellectual magazine” launches–such as Prospect, Monocle, The Economist’s Intellgent Life–is a battle for territory that has less to do with intelligence and more to do with economic prosperity and worldview dominance for its owners and advertisers. Which, of course, is nothing new in the media (see this overview), and thanks to Johnson, is neither hidden nor subtle in Standpoint’s stated goal:
to defend and celebrate Western civilisation.
That is, Johnson knows that in the time of the credit crunch, it’s not the lower and middle classes who prosper but the rich. So let’s create magazines for the ‘intellectual’ where ‘intellectual = rich, and politics = capital’.
It doesn’t take a great leap of intellect to work out that the magazines that are going to do best in this time are those that support this brand chain of command. Monocle goes from strength to strength on this model, as Vanity Fair expands across Europe, In the UK, Grazia grows onwards, and The Spectator has increased its sales, according to James Robinson reporting in The Observer, by
strengthening its financial coverage and introducing articles on luxury living, which attract a new set of advertisers.
But let’s begin with Standpoint. Read more
Men’s magazines: the intellectuals
As reported by The Observer on Sunday, today sees the launch of the much anticipated Standpoint, a new monthly magazine with a relatively unambiguous editorial position.
According to its editor, former Telegraph assoicate editor Daniel Johnson, Standpoint will “defend and celebrate Western Civilisation”. In an interview with the New Culture Forum, Johnson says that “I think there is a much larger constituency for a reassertion of western values such as free speech, the dignity of the individual and the rule of law than cynics on the Left or the Right suppose.”
Left and Right
Although he pairs cynics of the Left and Right together, for The Observer Johnson rejects the idea that Standpoint will be only for the Right. This, despite the fact that anticipation has been coming from and heralded from, specifically, the Right (for example). Indeed, Johnson suggests “the world’s changed beyond recognition. The old left/right categories don’t work any more.” As The Observer comments:
That is a familiar argument that has been played out endlessly in recent years, making unlikely allies of American neo-conservatives and European liberals, and it is a discussion that will continue on the pages of Standpoint.
Inside the magazine
So what will be on the pages of Standpoint? Will it deliver politically agnostic intellectual stimulation? Will it steal readers from The Spectator or, even the dwindling leftist magazine, the New Statesman? Johnson suggests writers such as Alain de Botton and Andrew Marr show the magazine reaches out to “anybody with an ounce of intellectual curiosity”. So who and what is in the launch issue? A sample:
- Alain de Botton on faith ["intellectual cotton candy", "a philosphical pub crawl" ]
- Jung Chang and Simon Sebag Montefiore on Mao and Stalin
- new poetry by Robert Conquest [Margaret Thatcher's speechwriter]
- Andrew Marr on the Telegraph cartoonist Matt
- Tim ‘vote UKIP’ Congdon on why we shouldn’t scapegoat the bankers [really?]
- Eton educated Telegraph columnist on Prospect’s 100 top public intellectuals
- Michael Burleigh on the war on terror [Telegraph writer, dislike for all things Islamic]
- Douglas Murray on censorship [author of Neoconservatism: Why We Need It]
- Alasdair Palmer on family courts [Better Rough Justice than another 9/11]
- Emanuele Ottolenghi on how Europe has betrayed Israel [and the Palestinians?]
So, that’s settled then: a balanced world view if ever I saw one.
Final word: will it survive?
Magforum has a great overview of the ‘intellectual’ business/politics market and the likelihood of survival for any new magazines entering the market. For Standpoint, both the ‘left’ and ‘right’ are in general agreement that Standpoint is coming along at the right time–the Cameron’s Conservative renaissance–and timing, as we know, is everything.
Well, not quite everything. What’s more interesting from The Observer article, although only touched on superficially, is the political economy (and economics) of the magazine: how ownership, control and advertising are the drivers of new magazine launches, of course, not the ‘intellectual curiosity’ of the readers. I’ll be looking at this tomorrow in the context of late capitalism’s rise of the luxury brand.
‘Cheaper to cover Britney than the IPCC’
Considering the undressed lengths that Britney has been reaching for press coverage recently, this is not a surprising. But thanks to Alisa Miller, CEO of Public Radio International in the US, this fantastic Friday headline is now legitimately used.
In a five minute talk to the TED conference, Alisa neatly visualises the American mainstream news media coverage in February 2007. This was on the back of some research from the Pew Centre for Excellence in Journalism and their State of the News Media report. Take a look at these maps, the first by land mass. Read more
Journalism: craft or profession?
Its essay time. And the proactive students are asking questions of the lecturers here (at Sunderland University) that I feel are useful for a wider audience. One particularly pertinent question (to me, to an article in the LRB I only got to read recently) was one of the recurring themes of journalism: is it a craft with skills best learnt in practice on the job, or is it a profession like law or accountancy: requiring formal education?
There’s been quite a bit of debate around this recently.
The hybrid newswork
Yesterday I talked through the different aspects of ‘citizen journalism’ and ‘networked journalism’ with my social media class (first PR students, then journalists). As I’ve already expressed, ‘networked journalism’ is I believe the more important for the future survival of the mainstream news industry. It also comes as a relief for the old institutions (as long as they change) becuse it communicates a model, fast being implemented (for example by OhMyNews in Korea) that retains the institution at the centre of the ‘newswork’ (the production of the objects of news, that makes up the news agenda).
‘Networked journalism’, well summarized by Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine.com, was discussed by Jo Bardoel and Mark Deuze in their article ‘Network Journalism’ published in the Australian Journalism Review (23.3) back in 2001. Mark Deuze’s more recent article ‘Preparing for an Age of Participatory News’ (Journalism Practice 2007 (1.3)) quotes Jarvis, who has the talent for the turn of phrase, describing networked journalism as the process that:
“takes into account the collaborative nature of journalism now: professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story, linking to each other across brands and old boundaries to share facts, questions, answers, ideas, perspectives.”
Jeff Jarvis, Buzzmachine.com (2006)
And the UK regional market is a seedbed of some of the best pioneering work in this area. Read more
