alexlockwood.net

Climate of coverage: Lord Turner’s report

The beginning of this week saw the press respond (or not) to Lord Adair Turner’s new report on reducing our UK carbon emissions as part of his role as chair of the government’s Committee on Climate Change. Taking a snapshot (or synchronic, to use the technical term) analysis of the coverage of the report in the papers on Monday, Tuesday, provides a useful bellwether in understanding exactly how our national press are thinking (or not) about climate change. More »

Tags: analysis, campaign, comment, coverage, democracy, discourse, economics, economy, environment, environmentalism, green, Guardian, Helweg-Larsen, IPCC, Journalism, Lomborg, media, news, newspaper, newspapers, politics, professionalism, reporting, research, rhetoric, scepticism, scientists, tabloids

Newcastle’s Chronicle, Daily Mail are green winners

The Press Gazette have announced the winners of their inaugural Environmental Journalism awards, and illustrated in one move what a strange and contradictory thing such events can be. First of all, what the judges got right before what they got totally wrong.

Most importantly, the special commendation for Newcastle’s Evening Chronicle and it’s Go Green initiatives over the course of a year. The relationship between regional living, local media and environmental sustainability may be one of circumstance as much as anything, but initiatives such as the Transition Town movement over here and the Locavores in the US provide a hint that regional media can both survive the industry downturn and develop ecological living patterns through such environmentally-focused editorial. The Chronicle are running their own awards for local environmental champions. More »

Tags: BBC, campaign, coverage, ecology, economics, environment, environmentalism, green, greenpeace, Guardian, jobs, Journalism, kyoto, local, magazines, media, news, regional, reporting, students, US

James Hansen in Parliament today

James Hansen, NASA scientist, is in Westminster today to give evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee on the impact of current science on climate policy. It’s being billed by new group Climate Safety as “one humdinger of a debate” between, in the red corner, Hansen and researcher Tim Helweg-Larsen of the Public Interest Research Centre, as they go head-to-head with, in the blue corner, Professor John Beddington and Professor Robert Watson, both Chief Scientific Advisers to the UK Government. You can watch it live at 2.30pm on Parliament TV.

Hansen has had a busy week in the news and on the blogs, particularly for his letter to Obama. It’s been critiqued as alarmist on a number of skeptic blogs, such as SkepticsGlobalWarming and CO2Sceptic, but not only from the sceptical side of the debate. Joe Romm of Climate Progress also critiques Hansen, and splits from his conclusion that are firmly behind the 350.org call for change (he’s one of their identified ‘messengers’: More »

Tags: blogging, blogs, business, environmentalism, Hansen, Helweg-Larsen, IPCC, news, Obama, reporting, research, scepticism, science, scientists

Shelling out on sustainability

Energy company (didn’t they used to be an oil company?) Shell are running a series of web dialogues, with today’s (6am GMT time, unfortunately they are not supplying the coffee) on ‘Sustainability Communications’ with their V-P for Comms, Björn Edlund.

Early skirmishes between the Comms team and the great unwashed (it is 6am) remind me something of either a manicured garden or Capoeira - well managed and quite elegant to look at or watch, in its own way. If Bjorn and his team are not at present reclining in Lazy Boys in reality, metaphorically it seems they are. Perhaps that is the nature of self-selection for those who would be taking part in such a web chat.

The most interesting Q/A so far (6.32am) is this: More »

Tags: activism, alism, biness, Bjorn Edlund, campaign, capitalism, comment, economics, economy, environment, environmentalism, Foucault, greenwash, hegemony, jobs, language, media, news, politics, professionalism, programming, psychology, regulation, reporting, representation, research, sharing, Shell, students, training, US

Pachauri’s blog and President Obama

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has launched his own blog.

It’s a curious thing for someone already so well known, well positioned, to do (hence the exclamation marks from Wattsupwiththat). It is also not that sophisticated as a portfolio site.

Perhaps the process of leading the IPCC through tortuous negotiations processes around the text of each IPCC report has been so painful that Pachauri feels the need to communicate without so many restrictions. If Pachauri thinks opening up a blog is anything of a nicer experience, he might want to think again.

The latest blog post from Nov 5 looks at President-elect Obama’s positioning on climate change. As chair of the IPCC, Pachauri’s views are worth accounting for: More »

Tags: barack obama, blogging, blogs, Canada, Congress, coverage, economics, environment, environmentalism, green, greenpeace, Guardian, IPCC, news, politics, reporting, science, US

Climate change bill passed (in the night)

Well I think I spoke too soon. There was very little coverage of the Climate Change Bill passing its commons stages. Perhaps this was due to the Brand-effect, or that most journalists are still deployed onto credit crunching topics. Prince Charles did make it into the papers yesterday talking about the ‘climate crunch’.

But so far I’ve found only two MSM reports on the passing of the climate change bill; a bill which is a world-first in setting legal targets for nation-state government:

• Historic, yet nothing has been done (The Guardian)
• Companies face mandatory CO2 reporting (The FT)

The same angle on companies reporting their CO2 emissions was reported in The Telegraph prior to the vote on the bill.

What’s the reason for such a low level of coverage?
There are probably a few. More »

Tags: business, campaign, Caroline Lucas, climate change bill, coverage, ecology, environmentalism, green, Guardian, news, reporting, scientists, WWF

Engaging across blogging divides on climate

Last week, an anthropology PhD student in New Zealand wrote a summary and response to a paper I gave at the Association for Journalism Education annual conference, in September this year. I though her commentary was a thoughtful piece with a fair set of conclusions: that bloggers self-select their networks based on beliefs. And that my beliefs were as rigid as any “climate sceptic”.

One thing Picking Up Sticks noted in the piece was the lack of engagement across the networks; “deniers” and “believers” rarely talk. This is a currently recognised theme online, and not just around climate change: take the U.S. election, for example. The TV producer Adam Curtis described blogging self-selection in an interview with The Register last year: More »

Tags: advertising, blogging, blogs, censorship, comment, denial, deniers, education, environmentalism, Guardian, industry, IPCC, Journalism, magazines, McIntyre, news, PHD, politics, psychology, reporting, research, rhetoric, scepticism, science, scientists, students, Sunderland, training

More on the Daily Mail’s plastic love affair

Following my opinion piece over on Journalism.co.uk about the hypocrisy that would entail if the Daily Mail really were to win the Press Gazette Environmental Press Awards campaign of the year, I came across another link to a story, published by the Press Gazette, from last year.

My argument is that the Daily Mail’s “Ban the Bags” campaign was a co-opt of an already running and successful campaign that was building its own momentum. Other than that, of course, the DM’s coverage is so invidiously contradictory and generally anti-environment, particularly against legislation to combat climate change (the Kyoto Protocol, the UK Climate Change Bill), that any award would be tough to swallow; and particularly this award for the Ban the Bags campaign, as it has barely added anything new.

And so the link and quote is worth publishing:

Editor of the Mail on Sunday Peter Wright defended his newspapers’ use of covermounts and other promotions to boost circulation.

“When the history of newspapers is written, it may well be that the greatest innovation of our generation is the humble polybag,” Wright said.

And if that point is not clear enough, Wright continues:

“Any editor who wants his paper still to be here in 2020 needs to be constantly thinking about what he can add to his paper and what he can put into his polybag that will make his newspaper better value to the reader.”

How about a nice manufaturing-intense polyeurythane statuette of Janus for the average Daily Mail reader’s mantelpiece? (And before any criticisms of prejudice, I’m thinking here of my mother, who still buys the paper after working there as a clerk in the 1960s).

Tags: campaign, coverage, Daily Mail, environmentalism, Mail on Sunday, news, newspaper, newspapers, Peter Wright, Press Gazette Environmental Press Awards

Selective nominating: Daily Mail the greenest of all?

The Press Gazette Environmental Press Awards shortlist was announced Monday, with some familiar and surprising names on the list.

Can-Do Attitude
Up for Environment Journalist of the Year is Fiona Harvey, at the Financial Times, who I spoke to earlier this year. I admire Fiona: she has been a recipient of awards before, and ploughs a lonely furrow for environment coverage at the FT. She was reasonably recalcitrant to begin with, and unsurprisingly, as she’s had some difficult time with interviewers. (I’m also a fan of Media Lens, however.)

One of her reasons for continued nominations in awards such as these is the approach she, and the FT, take to reporting on the environment, which is both consistent and positive. This is what Fiona said:

Positive coverage is very much an FT outlook. We’re very solutions focused—we won’t just present the problem. Our readership is generally in positions of power. They don’t like to be told there’s a problem without some way of dealing with it. So we like to think we’ve got a very can-do attitude, it’s not just ‘oh dear’ and that’s with all issues, not just the environment.

Choking on my toast
There isn’t a single paper, and certainly not the FT, that isn’t in some way hypocritical and/or contradictory in terms of its coverage of environment and climate change. Very often, for example, stories appearing in the same paper take totally different positions, whether written by the Political Editor or Environment Correspondent.

None more so than the Daily Mail, which is up for ‘campaign of the year’. I nearly choked on my toast. Why? More »

Tags: campaign, coverage, Daily Mail, economics, environment, environmentalism, green, kyoto, media, news, newspaper, newspapers, politics, press gazette, reporting, scepticism, tabloids, water

Animal suicide: new global warming ad

Picked up this from a US-based social media and PR class blog.

This was unsettling to watch, for a few reasons. One, it is well made, put together by a Portuguese environmental organization named Quercus. The PSA was created by McCann Erickson Portugal.

The tag line at the end of the video reads “Global Warming - If you give up, they give up.”

However, the anthropomorphism is unsettling and perhaps a problem. The manipulation of images of polar bears has already given denialists plenty of ammunition against effective action on climate change (not least Sarah Palin, of course, who sued the Federal Government in the US on its decision to list Polar Bears as under threat).

I’m not wholly comfortable with the attribution of such human decision-making to animals. Not least because animals are smarter than we’ve been - they look after their own habitats much better than we do.

The question is, what gathering of meaning does this message contribute to? If this is one singular event of a particular form of message, what message pool does it contribute to at the semiotic level? What ‘regime of truth’ does it help supplement? That if animals are sentient enough to ‘give up’, does that justify their own extinction? Did the Javan Tiger (extinct) really ‘give up’ because we gave up on its habitat or right to life?

As appreciative as I am of the efforts of this Portuguese group, the fact that an ad agency (ultimate goal and mindset is one of capital and money making; I worked in advertising, and I know that people in that industry are not in general aware of the need to be semiotically and psychologically aware of the content of their messages) came up with this advert says a lot of the type of ad that it is. Think for example of the Coca-Cola Polar Bear, and you see the same anthropomorphic intent.

In no way should any message cloud the understanding, at a conscious, semiotic or unconscious level, that animals are without choice in a world so comprehensively dominated by one species. Yes, if we give up on tackling global warming, they are doomed, but not because of any choice on their part. I’d prefer an ad that apportioned all responsibility for extinction of animals, where linked to global warming, to those actually responsible: us.

Tags: advertising, adverts, animals, blogging, blogs, denialists, ecology, environmentalism, global warming, image, industry, media, news, psychology, semiotics, tigers