alexlockwood.net

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

Climate change likened to ‘Y2k scam’

One of the most arresting case studies in Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News, about the ‘churnalism’ of poor reporting/stories that is sweeping through the journalism industry as the result of its commercialisation, is about Y2K - the millennium bug.

Davies successfully shows how a ‘non-story’ fed itself, both politically and in the press, until it was a major moral panic that costs millions (and made some people millions), and took up a huge amount of column inches in newspapers and magazines worldwide. And at one minute past midnight on Jan 1, 2000… nothing happened. It was a fake story, blown up out of nothing. But that didn’t stop most major news outlets and governments acting as if it was real: check out this retro BBC map of ‘millenniun bug’ infected countries. For an even better BBC entry on the bug, the h2g2 website got it absolutely right… More »

Tags: BBC, blogging, blogs, churnalism, comment, Copenhagen, image, indtry, Journalism, language, Lomborg, magazines, media, news, newspaper, newspapers, politics, reporting, research, science, sharing, US

Camp language: watching the media on Kingsnorth

I can’t make it to Climate Camp as I’ve got a couple of deadlines approaching for a book chapter and article (both on climate change–reasonable excuse?) But to do my bit I’m going to try and monitor the language that the media uses to report on activities at the camp.

I’ll look at the different ways in which the actors and claims-makers are treated in the media. As John Richardson says in his book Analysing Newspapers, “Successive studies of journalism have shown that there is often social or ideological significance between the choices” of how subjects are treated by the media (Richardson 2007,  56). In particular, the level of agency given to the actors in a particular situation–how are they described, how are their actions described, are they given or deleted agency? More »

Tags: Climate Camp, climate change, language, media coverage, newspapers