Environmental Risks and the Media
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Environmental Risks and the Media explores the ways in which environmental risks, threats and hazards are represented, transformed and contested by the media. At a time when popular conceptions of the environment as a stable, natural world with which humanity interferes are being increasingly contested, the medias methods of encouraging audiences to think about environmental risks - from the BSE or 'mad cow' crisis to global climate change - are becoming more and more controversial.Examining large-scale disasters, as well as 'everyday' hazards, the contributors consider the tensions between entertainment and information in media coverage of the environment. How do the media frame 'expert', 'counter-expert' and 'lay public' definitions of environmental risk? What role do environmental pressure groups like Greenpeace or 'eco-warriors' and 'green guerrillas' play in shaping what gets covered and how? Does the media emphasis on spectacular events at the expense of issue-sensitive reporting exacerbate the public tendency to overestimate sudden and violent risks and underestimate chronic long-term ones?
List of figures and tablesList of contributorsForewordAcknowledgementsIntroduction: the media politics of environmental risk1Pt. IMapping environmental risks271TV news, lay voices and the visualisation of environmental risks292Interest group strategies and journalistic norms: news media framing of environmental issues453Claims-making and framing in British newspaper coverage of the 'Brent Spar' controversy554The burrowers: news about bodies, tunnels and green guerrillas73Pt. IIDenaturalising risk politics915Environmental pressure politics and the 'risk society'936'Industry causes lung cancer': would you be happy with that headline? Environmental health and local politics1057The media timescapes of BSE news1178Reporting risks: problematising public participation and the Human Genome Project130Pt. IIIBodies, risks and public environments1439Selling control: ideological dilemmas of sun, tanning, risk and leisure14510Exclusionary environments: the media career of youth homelessness16011The female body at risk: media, sexual violence and the gendering of public environments17112'Landscapes of fear': public places, fear of crime and the media184Pt. IVGlobalising environments at risk19913Communicating climate change through the media: predictions, politics and perceptions of risk20114Global citizenship, the environment and the media21815Mediating the risks of virtual environments229Bibliography241Index265
