Climate change is not just a scientific, technical or economic matter. It poses profoundly ethical and political challenges to human institutions, including journalism.
This chapter explores some normative dimensions of a triangular relationship â journalism, democracy and climate crisis â and raises questions about whether global climate crisis necessitates different ethical touchstones for assessing and potentially guiding journalismâs practices, structures and texts.
In Western debates about journalism ethics, journalism is evaluated above all by how well it makes democracy work. But that statement needs immediate qualification. Democratic purposes do not exhaust journalistsâ professional self-definition. Globally, journalism takes many forms, accepts different ethos and experiences different relationships with economic and political systems, even within the advanced capitalist states (cf. Hallin and Mancini 2004); it âdoes have a life outside democraciesâ (Josephi 2013).
Nor is democracy a goal universally shared. Concerns for security, stability, social harmony, law and order and economic well-being often trump commitment to democracy. In the context of economic stagnation, superpower nostalgia and political turbulence, a majority of Russians apparently feel that strong leadership is more important than democracy (Pew Research Center 2012). In Singapore, paternalistic governments proclaim a commitment to âAsian valuesâ. In capitalismâs heartland, for millions of non-European and Indigenous people, American democracy has historically meant expropriation, slavery, even genocide (Hackett and Carroll 2006: 11). Nor is democracy necessarily liberal, in the sense of protecting individual and minority rights. In recent history, various countries have elected governments that legalize discrimination against religious or ethnic minorities. Moreover, as the late Canadian political theorist C.B. Macpherson (1966) argued, the âreal world of democracyâ can encompass, in theory at least, vastly different political and economic systems â from free market liberalism, to the Marxist project of building a classless society, and the postcolonial development-oriented states of the global South.
Yet democracy, in the sense of legitimacy derived from a popular mandate, is undeniably the globally dominant form of political legitimation: âpolitical regimes of all kinds describe themselves as democraciesâ, argues a leading political theorist, David Held (2006: 1). As the rebellious peasant haranguing King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, actor Michael Palin expresses the point comically: âsupreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.â
But there is considerable variation within political theory on three key issues: What is the core meaning of democracy? Is it necessarily a good thing, and why? What are its actual practices, boundaries and preconditions (Cunningham et al. 2015)? Different models of democracy have different answers, and accordingly different expectations (typically only implicit) for the legitimate role of communication media. As discussed in the Introduction to this book, Christians et al. (2009) have identified several different key roles that democratic journalism is expected to perform: the monitorial function of reporting on publicly relevant events and developments, the facilitative role of nourishing democratic public spheres and popular engagement with public issues, the radical role of exposing injustice and encouraging social change, and the collaborative role of supporting broader social purposes and institutions.
These benchmarks have differential relevance to contending models of democracy, to which we now turn. Read with caution: no definitive review is attempted here! To highlight their divergences, we override nuance and massage models of democracy into a trio: market liberalism, deliberative democracy and radical egalitarian democracy. Each of these implies (but does not rigidly entail) different expectations of how journalism should function, what its ethical principles and practices should be, and what kind of institutional and legal frameworks best support it.
Democracies and their journalisms1
For much of the Cold War period, a leading tradition in the West for understanding democracy and the media was liberal-pluralism. It sees democracy as âa process of competition between diverse interests and multiple power centresâ (Curran 2011: 80); like politics, the media marketplace should be open to such competition without being restrained by either government policy or the requirements of objectivity. Instead, it embraced advocacy and partisanship and a âfree-forall market approach to journalismâ (ibid). While it still provides the underlying normative rationale for the British approach to print journalism, it has arguably been supplanted â at least in elite policy discourse â by approaches informed by neoliberalism, with its assumptions of atomized individuals making rational, self-interested choices in economic and political marketplaces.
Market liberalism and elitist democracy
Since the 1980s, the âfree marketâ vision of democracy has gained political and cultural hegemony in the U.S. and the U.K. Democracy is seen not as an end in itself, but as normally the best institutional arrangement to maintain political stability and a liberal political culture characterized by individual rights and choice, particularly economic rights of ownership, contract and exchange. âThe marketâ is seen as the best organizing principle for not only the economy, but also society more generally; it is taken to be the realm of âfreedomâ and individual choice, by contrast with politics as a necessary evil, the realm of coercion.
Free market politicians often adopt populist rhetoric, bashing âliberalâ cultural elites. But the same politicians â such as Republicans in the U.S., Conservatives in Canada, the inappropriately named (right-wing) âLiberal Partyâ in Australia and so on â also introduce voter suppression legislation that makes it more difficult for socially disadvantaged groups to exercise their franchise. This is no coincidence, as the âfree marketâ preference for minimal government â apart from maintaining social order through the Stateâs military and police powers â actually fits well with a âcompetitive elitistâ version of democracy classically articulated by the Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter (1976; cited in Baker 2002: 130; see also Held 2006: 126â57). In this view, the complexity of modern political issues, the vulnerability of the masses to irrational and emotional appeals, and the risk of overloading the political system with competing demands makes ongoing public participation neither necessary nor even desirable. Democracy is seen as a procedure for selecting between âcompeting teams of elitesâ (Curran 2011: 80), with citizen participation confined mainly to voting every few years â essentially, the role of consumers in a political marketplace. Policy-makers can be held sufficiently accountable through periodic elections, the entrenchment of individual political rights and a free press.
For its part, the press âneed not provide for nor promote peopleâs intelligent political involvement or reflectionâ, since âmeaningful understanding of social forces and structural problems is beyond the populaceâs capacityâ (Baker 2002: 133); nor need it raise fundamental questions about State policy or the social order. So much for the public sphere.
Nevertheless, journalism does have positive monitorial roles in the market liberal model. By exposing corruption and the abuse of power, the press should act as a watchdog on government, which is considered the main threat to individual freedom. And journalism, particularly the âqualityâ press, should report intra-elite debates and circulate âobjectiveâ information useful to elites themselves â a mandate for journalism articulated almost a century ago by the legendary American political columnist Walter Lippmann (1922).
Still, the objectivity ethos should not be imposed on the press. Media owners are free to flog their own views, held in check by consumersâ presumed ability to punish excessively biased or inaccurate media in the marketplace. Or not. Market-driven media do not necessarily generate a self-correcting marketplace of ideas. In the U.S., a combination of broadcasting deregulation, political polarization and the explosion of online outlets has enabled citizens to live in media cocoons that nurture their own prejudices. While Rupert Murdochâs Fox News network famously led the way in creating a self-validating political universe indifferent to fact-checking or objectivity, it is not unique.
Public sphere liberalism/deliberative democracy
The elitist model of democracy has been criticized on many grounds. Its negative view of citizensâ participation is unduly pessimistic. In referenda and elections on fundamental issues, citizens have sometimes shown a remarkable capacity for learning and civic engagement. Conversely, scandals such as the apparent manipulation of security intelligence by the U.S. and U.K. governments before they invaded Iraq in 2003 suggest that the elitist model overestimates the competence and accountability of policy-makers without ongoing public participation.
Similarly, the related market liberal approach to democracy overlooks the excessive power of concentrated wealth in policy-making processes. It dismisses the threat to political equality and even meaningful individual freedom posed by the growing gap between rich and poor, a gap reinforced by neoliberal policies of cutbacks to social programs, public services and taxation of the wealthy. It ignores the erosion, by a culture of acquisitive individualism, of the sense of community underpinning democratic governance. And from an ecological perspective, market liberalismâs adulation of property rights and the pursuit of private gain sits uneasily beside the green acceptance of collective solutions and governmental intervention to environmental challenges, and the need for constraints on individual consumption (Martell, cited in Carter 2007: 68). Market liberalism is even less likely to entertain radical green challenges to capitalism as an inherently ecologically destructive system driven by the constant expansion of capital (Klein 2014; Magdoff and Foster 2011).
Such considerations have strengthened an alternative vision that accepts the elitist democratsâ support for individual rights and an independent âwatchdogâ press, but places a much higher value on popular participation through established political channels. Participation can be valued as a means both to produce more just and legitimate policies, and to develop the democratic capacities of citizens. Participation is not simply a question of voting, but of engagement in deliberation, understood as:
the exchange of reasons under conditions of fairness and equality among citizens who are open to competing arguments and, where necessary, accommodating alternative views. In this sense deliberative democracy takes seriously the idea that preferences are formed as part of the political process.
(Niemeyer 2013: 430)
Deliberative democracy would also be inclusive, in that people who are affected by a decision âhave the opportunity to deliberate and provide input into the decision-making processâ, and all issues of interest to civil society are addressed, including those related to the environment (pp. 430, 433).
In strong versions of such a participatory and deliberative democracy, not only public opinion but also government policy is shaped through civil societyâs collective deliberations about its future. Deliberation is consequential, in that citizensâ deliberations would be reflected in the decision being made (p. 430). The public sphere is culturally and institutionally central in this model.
What, then, are journalismâs key tasks in this model? They include the monitorial role and especially the facilitative role of nourishing the public sphere by encouraging public participation, providing a civic forum to sustain both pluralistic political competition and the search for social consensus, and stimulating general interest, public learning and civic engagement vis-Ă -vis the political process (Norris 2000: 25â35). To sustain deliberative democracy in a pluralistic society, Baker (2002: 129â53) advocates two offsetting types of news media: a segmented system that provides each significant cultural and political group with a forum to articulate and develop its interests; and public service media that can facilitate the search for society-wide political consensus by being universally accessible, inclusive (civil, objective, balanced and comprehensive), and thoughtfully discursive, not simply factual. Given the role of segmented media to represent particular and sometimes oppositional groups, objectivity is not a universal norm in journalism for deliberative democracy, but facilitating the formation of public opinion certainly is.
Radical democracies
The deliberative democratsâ critique is arguably an advance over market liberal/competitive elitist theory that justifies public political passivity and the attendant reproduction of inequality (Curran 2011: 81). Deliberative democracy poses a challenge to a supposedly representative democracy that is in practice dominated by political parties, lobbyists and professional image-makers. But its critique is blunted by a basic presupposition â the search for a reason-based consensus within the taken-for-granted hegemonic framework of contemporary capitalism. More radical visions of democracy problematize that assumption on the grounds that power imbalances can skew the process and outcomes of deliberation: âthe rhetoric of âbeing reasonableâ can be deployed by the powerful to exclude what they regard as âunreasonableâ, while the pursuit of consensus can obscure irreconcilable conflicts of value and interest in a manipulative form of closureâ (Curran 2011: 81).
The radical tradition reminds us that equality within deliberative venues â public spheres â is unlikely if inequality is rampant within the society at large. The models of democracy previously discussed developed, for the most part, in European nation-states and expanding American capitalism. Both of those contexts nourished but also constrained democracy. The French Revolution declared Liberty, Equality and Fraternity as core principles, but when the nation-state becomes the container and guarantor of political rights, what becomes of non-citizens within the national territory â say, African immigrants or West Asian refugees? Capitalism laid some of the cultural and legal building blocks of contemporary democracy, both positively, through (for example) generating the legal fiction of the freedom and equality of individuals as agents able to enter into contracts (for employment, investments, commodity purchases), and negatively, through creating the urban industrial working classes whose struggles against exploitation and for social and political rights put the âdemocracyâ in liberal democracy.
On the other hand, capitalism constrains the extent of popular sovereignty. Its economic inequalities are easily translated into political inequality. As Donald Trumpâs presidential campaign shows, billionaires do not need policy competence to acquire political influence; their wealth and celebrity status (under neoliberalism) as âsuccessful businessmenâ (and television celebrities, in Trumpâs case) suffice. Moreover, capitalism imposes its own limits on policy options. When electoral majorities have supported policies that challenge its fundamentals, capital may be prepared to discard the democratic process, and revert to authoritarian or even fascist government. Some cases in point: Chileâs military coup in 1973, ousting Salvador Allendeâs elected socialist government; the attempted coup against Venezuelaâs Hugo Chavez in 2002; and European Union pressure on governments such as Greece ...
