Risk Journalism between Transnational Politics and Climate Change

Ingrid Volkmer, Kasim Sharif

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319733081
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book introduces a new methodology to assess the way in which journalists today operate within a new sphere of communicative 'public' interdependence across global digital communities by focusing on climate change debates. The authors propose a framework of 'cosmopolitan loops, ' which addresses three major transformations in journalistic practice: the availability of 'fluid' webs of data which situate journalistic practice in a transnational arena; the increased involvement of journalists from developing countries in a transnationally interdependent sphere; and the increased awareness of a larger interconnected globalized 'risk' dimension of even local issues which shapes a new sphere of news 'horizons.' The authors draw on interviews with journalists to demonstrate that the construction of climate change 'issues' is increasingly situated in an emerging dimension of journalistic interconnectivity with climate actors across local, global and digital arenas and through physicaland digital spaces of flows.

© The Author(s) 2018

Ingrid Volkmer and Kasim SharifRisk Journalism between Transnational Politics and Climate ChangeThe Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political Communicationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73308-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Ingrid Volkmer¹ and Kasim Sharif¹

(1)

University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

Ingrid Volkmer

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Over the past years, the transnational debate of climate change has shifted. While only two decades ago, climate change was seen as a future risk of melting polar glacier caps, rising sea levels of oceans and implications of CO₂ emissions on the environment, these processes of planetary destruction are today significant—climate change has become not only a reality but also a catastrophe which requires urgent policy approaches to minimize further implications on a global scale.

Today, the transnationally highly politicized climate change debate focuses on concrete policy measures, such as processes of intergovernmental collaboration, global climate governance, dimensions of political environmental agency, accountability and legitimacy as well as ‘green’ civic identity. In other words, the debate is shifting away from national angles towards a new trans-societal policy terrain aiming to manage not ‘just’ an ambiguous globalized ‘risk’ (Beck 2009) emerging ‘in the future’ but to somehow control a concrete crisis of—as it seems—already severe environmental destruction.

Due to this matter of urgency, not only climate change ‘as such’ but climate governance is now moving into the focus of a world society to establish policy debates in new spheres beyond traditions of national/international relations. Governments of all world regions are forced to closely collaborate in a new policy dimension of equal interdependence across societies. It is a new perspective of a trans-societal political domain which already begins to produce policy measures. These are now less addressing the territorially ‘bounded’ national climate crisis but, in a new perception which politicizes globalized dense risk scenarios, the interdependence between phenomena.

It is also a new policy arena as it broadens the scope of actors to include multi-level stakeholders, policymakers, activists and citizens across societies—from industrialized countries and small Pacific island nations, from developing and developed world regions and all types of societies, democratic, authoritarian and so-called ‘failed’ states who specifically suffer from the implications of the climatic crisis. The traditional nationally oriented paradigm of domestic/foreign policy and even of international relations are more and more replaced by ‘horizontal’ public policy domains, emerging as trans-societal axes of global/local or local/local or, as cities in Indonesia are facing the same crises as cities in Mexico, Spain and Saudi Arabia, even city/city governance across all types of societies.

The need to shift from a national perspective to such a ‘horizontal’ trans-societal angle is also—and we should say: specifically!—important in the field of climate change journalism, as journalists are becoming ‘actors’ in broadened global climate policy domains. In today’s advanced stage of environmental crisis, climate change journalism can simply no longer be seen as ‘just’ a thematic ‘add-on’ or a side field of national/foreign journalism where—as various studies show—journalists in Western and non-Western regions struggle to somehow ‘squeeze’ at least some climate change stories into the daily news ‘beat’ format of traditional domestic/foreign journalism of, for example, national media. Climate change stories are—except for the coverage of important international conferences—seen as ‘slow’ news and are sidelined, appear in ‘weak’ frames in comparison with the highly dynamic daily ‘breaking’ news flows.

However, we have to perceive climate change journalism as a new journalistic field which requires more attention in journalism studies worldwide. It is a new journalism field which has—given the intensity of the politicized globalized interdependence of climate policy domains—an important public role as ‘communicator’ of the complexity of the cosmopolitan reality of climate change. Climate change journalism is no longer ‘just’ about addressing ‘issues’ but communicates the cosmopolitan reality of climate crises, and global risk governance to critically engage with measures of legitimacy and accountability of these global policy terrains again in a cosmopolitan perspective.

Although the spheres of communication and journalism are drivers of ‘risk’ awareness—for example, through the ‘magnifying’ of climate crises, peer-to-peer viral communication via social media, through big data and digital interactions across societies—climate change journalism and the larger field of what we might call ‘risk’ journalism are still on the periphery of journalism studies.

Journalism dealing with globalized ‘risk’ is mainly understood (and assessed) in the domains of domestic/foreign reporting. In consequence, conceptual frameworks of the role of journalism in such a globalized risk arena, methodologies and methods are aligned with the traditions of journalism research which emerged at the time of national mainstream media. While, more than a decade ago, some journalism scholars already made attempts to emphasize the crucial need for new methodological debates to identify the dimension of journalism in globalized landscapes and suggested a focus on the ‘global journalist’ (Reese 2001), on ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘risk’ communication (Cottle 2006) and the conceptualization of transnational dimensions of ‘risk’ (Berglez 2008) and global public spheres (Volkmer 2014), these approaches have never reached the main research agenda of journalism studies.

The majority of studies of climate change journalism have a national scope, even in international comparison of national journalism. As studies build on methodological traditions of national journalism and mainly address the output of mainstream media, such as national newspapers, it is not surprising that research is mainly news output oriented and identifies the way how national mainstream (print) media frame climate change and define the agenda in national contexts. Most studies have a focus on the USA and European countries (e.g. Brossard et al. 2004; Boykoff 2007a, b). A frequently adopted approach—specifically relating to transnational debates—is to assess the national coverage of meetings of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Overall, it seems—with very few exceptions—that (1) a focus on the Western world or (2) a comparison with Western countries by including a few developing countries (e.g. Midtun et al. 2015; Brueggemann and Engesser 2017) is still dominating the research agenda in Europe and the USA. Without doubt, nationally oriented studies have produced important insight into national climate change debates and the way how globalized policies are reflected along a national governance agenda at a time when Western nations took a lead in globalized climate change policy. However, we are now at a phase of heightened globalized interdependent climate change crises in a new domain of intense globalized climate governance and multi-stakeholder interaction on a globalized level which is developing policy frameworks for all societies. In the contours of such an emerging interdependent policy regime, the dominance of Western countries in journalism research can only produce a one-dimensional risk perception which now needs to be broadened to assess the ‘reflexivity’ of risk perception across other world regions.

Of course, a reason for the dominance of Western world regions in empirical research of climate change journalism is the relative silence of journalism scholars from non-Western regions which was the case until a few years ago. This silence was caused by the fact that climate change was not on the public agenda of some developing regions until a few years ago. The current increasing awareness among researchers of developing regions is related to a new inclusive policy approach of the IPCC requiring measures of all world regions to tackle the crisis. As climate change governance is now becoming a key domain for all societies, journalism scholars from developing regions are beginning to assess climate change journalism and—not surprisingly!—these studies reveal quite a different ‘reflexive’ dimension of risk perception and understanding of climate change as a journalistic field.

For example, scholars from Argentina (Mercado 2012), Uganda (Semujju 2013), Fiji (2015), China (Han et al. 2017) and Bangladesh (Rhaman 2016) tend to move away from a ‘media output centric’ view in order to assess the larger complexity of climate change journalism and relate climate change policies to sustainable societal development and progress. Studies address, for example, the links between transnational NGOs and their influence on the journalistic news agenda, such as in South Africa (Kwenda 2013). A study from Bangladesh argues that journalists, covering climate change, need to adopt new roles as societal ‘actors’ to actively interrogate in the political process of ‘social change’ and journalists need to be ‘ready to move beyond the professional mindset of the distant observer and neutral reporter to intervene in any situation that requires action’ (Das 2012, p. 228).

To begin to reposition the field, it might be useful first of all to look across disciplinary borders as this debate requires interdisciplinary approaches. An interdisciplinary debate as other disciplines, such as political science and sociology, policy domains addressing ‘risk’ and globalized interdependence of diverse risk formations—from climate change to migration and terrorism—are conceptualized as new domains of world politics (e.g. Albert 2016) in the parameter of a world society paradigm.

For example, specific approaches in political science address new formations of environmental security or—in the context of conceptualizing new types of globalized imbalances—a ‘growing ecological disconnectedness and disembeddedness between people and places’ which results in an ‘environmental load displacement’ from the North to the South (Christoff and Eckersley 2013, p. 19). More recent debates relate globalized ‘risk’ interdependence to migration processes and a call for a new policy angle as an outcome of climate change (Froehlich and Bettini 2017) others emphasize the new role of cities and ‘urban governance’—in regions of the global North and South (Castan Broto 2017).

In sociology, the conceptualization of globalized interdependence of ‘risk’ debates is quite advanced. Sociological debates of relativistic ‘globalization’ began in the 1970s and fully emerged in the early 1990s. For example, the interdependence of humanitarian crises was understood as a dimension of complex ‘global humanity’ and theorized in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Risk Journalism—In Contexts of Trans-societal Interdependence
• 3. Towards Cosmopolitan Relational ‘Scales’ of Actoral Interconnectivity
• 4. Pakistan, a Glocalized Context for Global Media Climate Change Research
• 5. Methodology
• 6. Cosmopolitanized Scales of Climate Change Communication: Arenas, Actors and Communicative Spaces
• 7. The Construction of Cosmopolitanized News of Climate Change at the Micro-scale: Representation, Production and Communication
• 8. Cosmopolitan Relational Loops of Interconnectivity
• Back Matter