Environmental Pollution and the Media

Political Discourses of Risk and Responsibility in Australia, China and Japan

Glenn D. Hook, Libby Lester, Meng Ji, Kingsley Edney, Chris G. Pope, Luli van der Does-Ishikawa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351773010
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

This book offers a theoretically informed empirical investigation of national media reporting and political discourse on environmental issues in Australia, China and Japan. It illuminates the risks, harms and responsibilities associated with climate change through an analysis of pollution, adopting an interdisciplinary approach drawing on both the social sciences and humanities. A particular strength of the work is the detailed analysis of the data using a range of both quantitative and qualitative techniques, enabling the authors to reveal in rich and compelling detail the complex relationship between risk and responsibility in the climate change discourse.

The case studies of Australia, China and Japan are set in the current literature as well as in the historical context of climate change in these three countries. The analysis of the media discourse on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia demonstrates how the mining of coal for overseas markets has led to devastating harm to the life of the reef. A critical discussion of the Chinese documentary, Under the Dome, shows how this medium has played a crucial role in building awareness of the harm from atmospheric pollution among the citizens, shaping attitudes and promoting action. The first case study of Japan elucidates how cross-border atmospheric pollution from China forges a chain of responsibility for responding to climate change, running from the state to society. The other case study of Japan demonstrates how 'smart cities' have emerged as a way to mitigate the risks and harms of climate change. The Conclusion draws together the similarities and differences in how climate change is addressed in the three countries.

In all, Environmental Pollution and the Media: Political Discourses of Risk and Responsibility in Australia, China and Japan uncovers the dynamics of the triadic relationship among risk, harm and climate change in Australia, China and Japan. By so doing, the book makes an original and timely contribution to understanding comparative media, discourse and political debates on climate change.

1
Introduction

This book represents research from a range of disciplines from the social sciences and humanities, six nationalities, divergent theoretical and methodological approaches and numerous spoken languages, although we use English here as our vehicle for communication. It is an exercise in scholarship under globalisation or, more precisely, an experiment in translation. As Silvio Waisbord has written of globalised research efforts in the field of communication:

The question is whether academic interest in promoting dialogue across intellectual heteroglossia is as strong as the desire to live comfortably within homophonic academic tribes. If the way the field historically developed foreshadows the future, then globalization will continue to facilitate conversations among specialized academic cultures around the world, but it might not prompt wide enthusiasm in transcending difference. In a field brimming with academic diversity cultures, difference may be tolerated, yet toleration might not imply actual engagement with difference and the politics of translation.

(2016: 881)

Here, Waisbord is not focused purely on linguistic translation – on ‘semantics and the biases of language’ (although this is always a factor) – but on the ‘translatability of differences across intellectual traditions and the institutional logics of academe’ (2016: 872). Such a focus, he suggests, reveals why the growth in cross-national comparative studies has not been accompanied by a similar trend across theoretical or methodological approaches. ‘Translation’, he writes, ‘demands commonalities as well as a willingness to overcome differences’ (2016: 879). He continues:

Bridge crossing might be desirable, but it will not gain much traction as long as scholars are, at best, mildly interested in finding intellectual kinship across difference. Without kinship, there is no translation – no search for commonness among difference. Finding and nurturing intellectual kinship requires openness to others. A dialogue between self and stranger, translation requires mutual curiosity and the welcoming of differences… It demands that participants are willing to engage with others and be open to mutual understanding. Interscholarly interest, cultural open-mindedness, and receptiveness to difference are basic conditions for translation across academic cultures.

(2016: 880)

Our group worked to these conditions. Teasing out scholarly definitions and meanings that are presumed knowledge within disciplines, and stripping down terms, methods and different approaches, we sought to find common ground: a shared problem and a translation. We had come together to examine the media and political communication of the risks posed by pollution and climate change. Whether we studied Japanese government policy, Chinese political activism or Australian media discourses, each of us had been confronted by these risks. But our commonalities went deeper. We were all interested in how the nexus of climate change, media and policy has become increasingly amorphous, often disconnected from its causes and impacts, as well as the responsibility to respond to them, at the governmental and societal level. Given that this is a crucial point for the formation and enactment of public opinion and decision-making, it is worthy of serious investigation. It is a problem that well illustrates why we need to cross bridges.

Numerous studies have now charted a rise and fall in interest and action on environmental risks, including climate change, with media acknowledged as playing a central role in how publics and policymakers understand and respond to these risks. Research has drawn attention to the ways in which the professional practices of journalists and the logics of news organisations inadvertently gave voice to powerful interests (Hutchins and Lester 2015) and scepticism and denial, specifically when ‘balancing’ news coverage on climate change (Boykoff and Boykoff 2007; Boykoff 2013) or negotiating scientific ideas of ‘uncertainty’ (Allan 2002; Pollack 2005). Media carriage or containment of spectacular and symbolic images and messages to create awareness of risks and suffering is now better understood (Boykoff and Goodman 2009; Lester and Cottle 2009; Doyle 2011; Hansen 2011), as is the existence, deployment and impacts of strategic political communications and framing within environmental media discourses (Carvalho 2007; Hulme 2009; Nisbett 2009; Anderson 2013). The relationship between public opinion on climate change, mediated awareness and political affiliations has also been explored, including in terms of trust (Leiserowitz et al. 2013), patriotism (Tranter and Lester 2015) and fear (O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 2009).

International comparative work has provided insight into the dynamics of and differences within environmental coverage at a national level (Painter 2013; Schmidt et al. 2013; Schmidt and Schafer 2015), although this work still needs to confront the significant challenges posed by: (a) various media systems (Hallin and Mancini 2004); (b) dominant US and European paradigms, foci and/or personnel within the study of media and communications and mediated environmental conflict; and (c) looking behind texts to identify different cultural, professional and political practices that impact on media content (Lester 2015). Within the Asia-Pacific, particularly the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Pacific Island nations, the relationship between media, politics and the environment is particularly fraught, given the disproportionate impacts of a changing climate on poor and developing regions. Yet, here the relationship remains understudied when compared to the amount of research emerging from Europe and North America.

The transnational flow of political information about environmental risk is a current frontier for researchers. Studies of globalisation and cosmopolitanism suggest the existence of publics wanting to intervene in distant conflicts to alleviate distant problems and associated suffering (see, e.g., Beck 2006, 2009; Fraser 2007) and that media can provide a forum for exchange of opinions over political decision-making, legitimising environmental governance (Nanz and Steffek 2004). However, comparative and in-country empirical research in relation to environmental risks and the media can provide only limited insight into how these publics are formed and act. According to Hutchins and Lester:

A level of depth and scope in empirical evidence is needed that is commensurate with the reality of a ‘global, media age’ (Cottle 2013), and it is this challenge that promises to advance the theorization and understanding of mediatized environmental conflict at this moment in world history. The conduct and potential implications of environmental conflict occurring across borders and between nations and regions has been well recognized. But extensive and detailed evidence of precisely how governments, industry, activists, and the news media respond to environmental issues that are transnationally manifest is lacking. In Australia, for example, the impacts of the mining and forestry industries are evident through trade and diplomatic relations with countries located throughout the Asia-Pacific region, including Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea, China, India, Timor-Leste, and Papua New Guinea. These varied relations and their manifold environmental consequences require that media, political, and information flows in and between these nations and across the region are identified and evaluated. To study conflict in this way and at this scale is no small task, encompassing intricate networks of environmental concern, strategic webs of media and political influence, public policy debates, and bi-and multi-lateral trade negotiations and deals. Nonetheless, it is imperative that this research challenge is met, as this is the arena in which global environmental futures are set to be determined.

(2015: 353)

In attempting to meet this challenge, our team has focused on analysing media discourses of pollution created by fossil fuels: a visible, breathable manifestation of climate change. In particular, we focus on pollution produced by burning coal. This ‘pollution’ is dug from the ground, transported in massive ships through dredged sea channels out into oceans, to distant locations, where it is burned for electricity and steel production. The burning of coal generates gases that change the composition of the atmosphere, affecting our climate and weather. It also blackens buildings and enters lungs. Even a gentle westerly wind will carry this pollution across national borders, forcing residents in cities separated by seas to don face masks or to stay indoors. International banks and trading companies, with headquarters and offices across the countries where this pollution is carried by winds and complex supply chains, finance its production. Individuals support it when they turn on an electric light, and condemn it when they check particle concentrations on their smartphones.

How, we ask, is responsibility for this pollution that carries transnationally and is created transnationally attributed within media discourses? The literature on responsibility attribution within media crosses a range of broad subjects, including disasters (Pantti et al. 2012; Ewart and McLean 2015), health (Holton et al. 2012; Zhang et al. 2015), sports doping (Starke and Flemming 2015) and poverty (Kim et al. 2010; Yua et al. 2015), among others. Those that focus on environmental concerns (see, e.g., Olausson 2009, 2011; Liang et al. 2014; Lester 2016) tend to have a foundation premise that these framing and attribution processes produce identifiable debates and outcomes in the social world. They consider ‘responsibility’ both in terms of attribution of blame and assigning expectations of response and action (Funtowicz and Strand 2011), and seek to identify the intersecting sectors, issues, processes and actors that actively construct the framing of responsibility and attribution of blame in media reporting.

Responsibility attribution, they suggest, is constructed through dynamic interactions between and across the following areas:

1. Institutional decision-making and actions: governments, politics, natural disaster prevention and planning, international forums and negotiations (e.g. climate change conferences);
2. Symbolic power and discourse: media representations, activist communication strategies;
3. Scientific research: research activities, findings, announcements, and the responses to these (e.g. the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC]);
4. Non-human actors: the atmosphere, marine environments, wilderness, animal species;
5. Industry activity: resource allocation, production sites, labour relations, disaster management and clean-up, corporate communication and public relations (PR), political lobbying (e.g. agriculture and mining);
6. Economics and the market: corporate strategy, social licensing, trade negotiations and agreements; and,
7. Social actors: individualisation, health outcomes, representatives, citizen bodies, consumption decisions, audiences.

This book thus represents the collaborative output of experts from a range of disciplines, whose aim is to provide new insight into media roles in the communication of environmental harms and politics. We do this by focusing on discourses of risk and responsibility about atmospheric pollution within the Asia-Pacific region, concentrating on Australia, China and Japan. The next section summarises, analyses and evaluates the methodological challenges and innovations made in this book, illuminating how our joint efforts have attempted to contribute to developing new interdisciplinary research paradigms appropriate to the study of cross-national environmental discourse.

Methodological innovation

One of the key methodological innovations of this book is the use of automatic or semisupervised data coding and processing techniques in the study of media about the environment. Data mining methods provide an effective tool to uncover important patterns and trends in the media reporting of environmental issues. These data mining techniques based on detailed linguistic analysis have proven significantly more productive and versatile than traditional frequency-based analyses. Noteworthy features of the methodologies and analytical techniques developed and tested in this book include:

• The development of new analytical frameworks and the verification of theoretical frameworks adapted from cognate research fields such as international politics and national security;
• The testing of novel analytical concepts in environmental discourse, including new models for multisectoral interaction and partnership building on managing environmental health risks and growing environmental innovation businesses.

The following section illustrates the book’s methodological advances by summarising and highlighting the salient features of the research methodologies and approaches developed in the chapters to follow. Of particular note is how this joint work has applied techniques from corpus linguistics and empirical language and cultural studies to enhance transdisciplinary collaboration to tackle research issues of contemporary social significance. Meanwhile, our combined methodologies have provided an opportunity to assess the significance of the research findings obtained in our country-focused case studies. The case studies are set within the general context of environmental risks and responsibilities, initiatives of environmental social innovation formulated and led by different social and political sectors and actors and the emerging multisectoral interaction and partnership building on environmental risk management and innovation.

These reflect some emerging and rapidly growing areas in the multidisciplinary and transnational study of environment and development. The wide methodological scope and approaches developed in this book are a timely contribution for research students and academics intending to develop new interdisciplinary approaches in environmental studies. As noted above, the case studies presented in this book on Australia, China and Japan have attempted to break down the methodological barriers between various disciplines from the social sciences and the humanities such as international politics and security, media and journalism, area studies (e.g. Japanese Studies and Chinese Studies), applied language studies, computational linguistics and textual statistics.

As part of its aims, our book uses linguistically orientated approaches to the processing and analysis of environmental media texts developed collaboratively by the authors. The latest research from applied linguistics underscores some key aspects and stages of the empirical cases presented in this volume. These include the collection of environmental media materials and sources, the design and development of data coding schemes to facilitate the automatic corpus annotation and information retrieval process and the automatic extraction and modelling of textual patterns in the data sets collected. All these represent the latest research developments in corpus linguistics and its ongoing outreach into the social sciences. This fits in with the general and increasingly salient research trend of large data–informed disciplinary transformation across a number of research areas in the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, a momentum built up by the availability of ever larger amounts of information and data on ...