Media and its influence on issues related to climate change

Media & Climate Change

PADMAZA TALUKDAR

Since its very inception, mass media has been working as a forerunner in information propagation, in a way and at a rate unparalleled to any other means ever recorded in the history of mankind.

It had revolutionized the world, bringing people together and in a sense, instilling within us an essence of ‘one-ness’. As famously quoted, “All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level”, William Bernbach very accurately captured the essence of media.

The very notion behind the creation of mass media was communication.

Starting from Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1455 to its industrialization by Koenig in the early 1800s, the idea behind was to unite the urbanized, industrialized populations of the 19^th century. However, with time, the present day has become witness to more widespread reach of media tools to the mass populace.

The beginning of the glorious journey of Assamese media can be traced back to the inception of the ‘Orunodoi’, a monthly magazine started in 1846 and is generally credited with being the pioneer of journalism in Assam. It was written in a style with an appeal to the masses, nevertheless, containing a plethora of information on science, history, religion, and other forms of general knowledge.

Since then, a number of medium of information propagation, including newspapers, magazines etc. printed in both vernacular and English languages found their bloom and doom during the next few decades that followed, some of them surviving still and carrying on the legacy of being some of the first mass media tools of the early days.

The very genesis and growth of the nearly 175 years old Assamese media is intricately linked to and shaped by what can arguably be ascribed to our sub-regional nationalism. Such an attribution of nationalism to the shaping and formation of the discourse on Assamese media is well articulated and argued by many, not only at the local but also at the national level.

While many would argue that such sort of journalistic aberration, non-conforming to the very principles of journalism in general, had been intertwined into the formative construction of Assamese media, seldom can one overlook the fact that the in formation of an ‘Assamese identity’ and the sentimentality attached to it, the contribution of the early media houses towards the Assamese language, culture and society as a whole has been immense.

However, being somewhat deficit and devoid of the evolutionary knowledge of Assamese media, and its ever-evanescent concordance to the multi-faceted social-political issues, I would humbly refrain myself from commenting on the same.

Under the aegis of modern media, the unparalleled rate and pace of information dissemination to the masses is fairly conspicuous in today’s day and age. The shift of the global society, at large, towards democratization and the growth of human civilization, with its unquenchable thirst for information and knowledge, coupled with unprecedented changes in our surroundings and environment has led to growing concerns amidst citizens, regarding global issues like climate change, among many others.

It could be arguably said that media coverage of such issues has been responsible for generating widespread awareness among the masses.

When we talk about climate change, we observe that more often than not, the issues surrounding this particular subject are complex and highly debated, pertaining to the fact that the effects of the phenomena are not directly visible and at most times, do not take place ‘here and now’, that is, the most precarious of its consequences are believed to be nested sometime in the future.

The climate and its changes are observed and constructed/reconstructed primarily by scientists, the results of which are rather difficult to decipher by general masses. Additionally, due to the growing number of disciplines participating in climate science, each with their own kinds of data, models, heuristics and interpretations, pile up on its ‘unobtrusive’ nature.

Coupled with the political, economic and social discourses, we find the complexity of dealing with the issue of climate change considerably enhanced.

In addition, its is seen that stakeholders advocate different actions that are often based on elaborate, difficult to understand rationales and justifications, the most important strand of climate politics, arguably, being the issue of its governance, which constitutes a political process at the international, national and regional levels, and is far removed from peoples’ day-to-day life-worlds.

As a result, the causes and consequences of climate change, its implications, its governance etc. are not directly and easily perceivable, and what most people know about them stems from media communications.

The mass media- distributing content such as text, pictures, and sound to an anonymous and spatially diverse public via technical means, like newspapers, TV or radio- are particularly relevant in this respect.

Surveys in most countries of the Global North have shown that mass media- particularly television, followed by newspapers, and increasingly, the internet- are the most important sources from which people draw information about climate related issues, even more than peoples’ interpersonal communications with fellow and close constituents of their respective communities.

News media portrayals of climate change have strongly influenced personal and global mindsets about its implications. The transmission lag in the relay of information from scientific clusters and stakeholders to the masses is almost always bridged by media coverage.

The outlined importance of mass media communication on climate related issues have long been acknowledged by the scientific community. For eg., Carvalho’s description of the ‘politics of climate change communication’ offers a critical examination of the political vitality in the politics of climate change and discusses how people use various forms of communication to challenge existing power hierarchies dealing with the governance of climate change.

Because the very meaning of climate change and the numerous aspects of reality associated with it are constructed through communication, it would be safe to say that the communication practices and structures are constitutive of climate change politics. A broad variety of case studies and surveys demonstrate how the choices made within various forms of public engagement result from social interaction based on communication via mass media.

Carvalho in his book “Climate Change Politics: Communication and Public Engagement” articulates how communication in the form of media information is a key component of climate change politics and shows how it has the potential to invigorate civic politics. In today’s times, it can be observed that the masses represent, construct, and circulate ideas about climate issues based on what information they are fed with by the media and these constructs and practices, in turn, inevitably relate to decisions and public policies, as well as, to political identities.

The existence of climate change itself, its extent and urgency, as well as the appropriate responses and measures toward it are deeply contested owing to the multitude of perspectives among scientists, policy-makers, industrialists, non-governmental organizations etc., each of whom is likely to be actively seeking to establish their particular perspectives on the issue.

Using different kinds of strategic communication, these stakeholders often aim for media representation because it provides a forum for public debates in modern societies, ultimately playing a role in policy-formulation.

Therefore, stakeholders try to position themselves in the media in such a way that they can be seen as relevant and viable actors in the field, and to inject their position and views into coverage in order to influence the societal perceptions on climate change, subsequently affecting decisions about a particular path of action to tackle relevant issues.

With the formation and creation of international platforms for climate-related deliberations, such as the UNFCCC during the early 90s, media portrayal and influence on such issues have been ever increasing, to the extent that in today’s day and age, media coverage can even influence international aids for climate change mitigation actions both positively and negatively.

For instance, studies have shown that aid allocation has tended to follow patterns of reporting of the related issues in major newspapers. Douglas Van Belle and his colleagues have found that each New York Times article was correlated with USD 1.2 million in aid to developing countries.

Both total foreign and disaster aid showed positive correlations with newspaper and TV coverage in the US. Campaigning environmentalist groups have periodically continued to target high-profile funders of international development, especially The World Bank, The IMF and other influential regional banks as a result of increasing coverage of such environmental and climate-related issues by media houses.

When the issue of global warming first rose to prominence in the US and UK media, the focus was on mitigation fuelled by public interest generated by recent policy actions, as well as political and electoral conditions in the US context. For instance, presidential candidate George H.W. Bush used the slogan “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect…” on many occasions.

The beginning of the 1990s saw an increasingly complex politicization of the triple-interface of climate science-media-policy. This was attributed in part to when the coalescence of a small group of influential people and scientists emerged in the news to speak about climate-related issues.

Over time, starting from the early 1990s, there has been tremendous increase of media coverage, with observed spikes in coverage when a particular climate change influenced catastrophic event occurred or international deliberations relating to climate policies took place or when certain social events spreading awareness on such issues were held.

One such event was the release of the film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ by Al Gore in September 2006, which received a tremendous amount of publicity in news reporting, among many others. U.S. newspaper reports on the film spanned the news, business, entertainment and style sections, thus pushing climate change from being exclusively an ‘environmental issue’ to garnering attention of being also an economic-political-social issue.

During this time, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take on the long-awaited case regarding whether the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the federal Clean Air Act. This case turned on whether carbon dioxide was treated as a ‘pollutant’, and this question coupled with increased media attention from Gore’s film, generated an upswing in coverage.

As a result, in 2007, the court ruled carbon dioxide as a pollutant, thus giving the authority of its regulation to the EPA. This is a classic case of a situation where media has been able to influence a policy discourse in the regulation of climate related issues. Since then, the platform provided by media has become a plethora of myriad instances when climate issues have received enough attention to impact the discourse of governance and decisions of policy-makers.

Nevertheless, agenda-building efforts directed at the media are not always effective, and equally successful. Being seen by journalism as ‘gatekeepers’ of news flow, journalists and publishing houses play an overwhelmingly important role as intermediaries in deciding on which stakeholders, topics, and perspectives are to be represented in the media.

Because of the cross-sectional nature of the issue, most journalists writing about it are found to be not just monothematic experts on this issue. While an early survey showed considerable gaps in their knowledge about climate change, later studies have shown and documented a positive evolution in their knowledge about the same and their knowledge is now considered to be even better than that of decision-makers, NGO representatives and others. If such is the case, then it would be only painfully ignorant and corrosive to ignore the potential influence media might have in shaping public minds and policies alike.

However, it would be imprudent to assume homogeneity of media influences on, or for that matter, media coverage of climate-related issues throughout the globe. Varying national cultures of journalism tend to influence the portrayal of these issues in their respective regions. While developed countries of the Global North have been shown to rely heavily on scientific data for their climate deliberations, most, if not all, developing countries of the Global South tend to lean more towards the opinions of political elites on these issues.

Such a divide has generally been attributed to the incongruent habits and priorities of both worlds. The issues of poverty, economic instability, communal/cultural clashes, overpopulation that reeks the lands of most countries in the Global South, takes precedence in occupying a major portion of media coverage.

In recent times, due to the expansion of relatively accessible modes of mass media, like the Internet and the bloom of social media all over the world, including developing nations, awareness and updates on climate related issues have become considerably permeable to the masses.

Although, in the context of Assamese media, it has a long way to go to reach a stage where it can deliberately influence policy and governance discourses on climate change, there has been an explosion of platforms, which have started spreading the word and have immensely contributed to the education on such issues, in recent times.

More than conventional media houses like the print media and television, Internet media platforms and websites/organizations like ‘Mahabahu’, ‘Nezine’, ‘Aranyak’ etc. have shown great promise in keeping mass media straightforward, informative and influential on indispensable issues like climate change, among many others.

Considering the nascent involvement of Assamese media to climate related issues, the articulation of such issues has been commendable and immensely successful in percolating the essence of the importance of climate emergency through our community and society at large.

To quote the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles, that “nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse..”, and while knowing that there are flipsides to every coin, mass media has been giving way to damaging, if not destructive, boulevards of late, albeit having been recognized to create a more aware world. Perhaps, only society could give direction to society just like it gave power to media to shape its consciousness….

Note: Some excerpts and anecdotes have been referenced from various reliable scientific journals, news publications, website information etc.

[Padmaza Talukdar, PhD scholar, TERISAS, New Delhi & Consultant Research Assistant Transdisciplinary Research Cluster on Frugality Studies (TRCFS), JNU, New Delhi; Email: padmazatalukdar@gmail.com.]

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