Media, communication and environmental change

Abstract

"Environmental communication research has come a long way in the last few decades, on the one hand consolidating itself as a distinctive subfield of media and communication research, while at the same time healthily diversifying in terms of theoretical frameworks, analytical approaches and types of media and communications processes examined. The main achievement is perhaps the considerable advances in the last two decades towards an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the complex processes involved in the social ‘construction’ of the environment as an issue for public concern. We now know a great deal – although of course much remains to be done – about the news management, publicity and campaigning practices of environmental claims-makers, about environmental journalists and environmental journalism, about the organisational and economic pressures impinging on media organisations and their handling of the environment, and about the social, political and cultural implications of communication about the environment. The change experienced in the last couple of decades in how communication research approaches and analyses of ‘environment, media and communication’ can also be indicated by the changing vocabulary: from the lexis of ‘media effects’, ‘accuracy’, ‘bias’, ‘balance’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘causality’ to a vocabulary which points to the dynamic, fluid and multidirectional nature of social communication processes with terms like construction, interaction, reinforcement, engagement, information loops, resonance, circulation of claims and parallel forums of meaning creation."