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The impetus behind this book on climate change, journalism, and time is to assemble investigations of how journalism—in various locales—mediates the temporal complexities inherent in the broader issue of climate change. This is what we mean by the subtitle “Negotiating rifts of time.” This perspective initially emerged out of our observations of the many intersections and clashes of time at stake in journalistic mediations of climate change: immediate needs against uncertain futures, experiences of the weather and cultural memories of seasonal changes, the temporalities of scientific descriptions and predictions, modern categories and hierarchies of knowledge, generational divisions between young (female) activists and middle-aged (male) politicians, schisms between hopes of industrial innovation and progress and much more fundamental changes as well as conflicts between the temporalities of causation, blame, and the bearing of burdens.
Such temporal tensions are highly related to the “mediatized environmental conflict[s]” discussed by Hutchins and Lester (2015) and which they see as “mutually constitutive interactions” between the “spheres of action” of “Activism,” “Journalism,” “Formal politics,” and “Industry”—each of which relates to and mediates science in different ways and which collide at variously mediated “switching points.” What we propose in our book is that such conflicts can also be approached and generatively examined through the lens of temporality.
Seeing the issue of climate change and journalism from this perspective is related to a more fundamental schism in the relations between the temporalities of journalism and those of climate change as both an ecological process and world history. Climate change can be understood as both absent and present, ephemeral and tangible, latent and erupting, continuous and disjointed. In this way, climate change is much like time itself: a set of complex and interlinked processes that are ascribed meaning through experiences of singular (mediated) events, numerical measurements, and/or broader social and cultural temporal imaginations, e.g. Western notions of industrial time and progress or Indigenous cosmologies. Journalism—as an institution developed in the West—is well-equipped to deal with “events” understood as distinct “breaks” or moments in time and space; one of the key challenges for journalism’s handling of climate change is, however—as Adam writes in the Foreword—a fundamental “disconnect” between “climate change” and “climate events” (emphasis in the original).
The temporal scales and incremental changes inherent in climate change and related models of future trajectories are thus less compatible within conventional news and memory work as both of these forms are in need of concrete events that can be melded into journalistic practices and news values, e.g. a recently published UN report can establish a news hook because of its “newness” and singularity as an event. This incompatibility is thus both a result of scale and (in)visibility in the sense that journalism is not geared towards documenting incremental changes that are not always readily available to the senses of those doing the reporting. In our thinking about this, our project was thus initially inspired by Barbara Adam’s Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards (1998). In this book, Adam largely—as also evident in her succinct Foreword to this volume—conceives of the inabilities to adequately deal with climate change in Western politics and culture as a problem deeply ingrained in temporal imaginations undergirding Western modernity.
In discussing this, Adam employs the notion of a “timescape,” which—as she writes in the Foreword—is a “cluster” of different temporal aspects, i.e. whether time is context dependent or not, its elements of processual change, tempo and timing. All of these temporal characteristics, as well as their interrelations, are highly relevant for thinking about the journalistic mediation of climate change. Without going into detail, this relates to the intersection of newsworthy events, individual processes of information gathering, the times of mediating and circulation technologies, professional, social, and cultural rhythms of news institutions as well as modes of news consumption, the level of synchronicity with political processes (national and/or supra-national)—all of which are encompassed by specific constructions of national time, which again are located within the times of modernity resting on rationality and progress.
The chapters in this book add to Adam’s conceptual framework and develop it further by analyzing how the production of climate change journalism is the product of specific constellations or timescapes in various locations. A common but not necessarily explicitly worded concern relates, however, to Adam’s thoughts on why the issue of climate change sits so uneasily within the temporal scales of journalism. One challenge is, as noted above, the question of how to identify events that can be linked to climate change. A more fundamental challenge is, however, how to explicitly connect such events, e.g. extreme weather or climate migrations, to longer histories and uncertain futures at the intersection of environmental science and politics emanating from uneven processes of globalization—and to do so on a continuous basis that can inform and engage different people. We will return to such challenges for journalism at the end of this Introduction, and here just underline that an important starting point for us, as for Adam, is that the institution of journalism is a product of modernity and is thus largely founded upon imaginaries of linear, mechanical, and a relatively constricted extended present. This is linked to the fact that journalism has co-evolved with and is tied to two core institutions of modernity: national (democratic) governance and market economics—both of which are equally ill-equipped to deal with temporal scales much beyond election cycles and mid-term profits. Journalism, governance, and the market all cater to everyday experiences within specific—often national—communities from within which global—but unevenly distributed—present and future environmental hazards are constructed very differently. In general terms and also through a specific focus on journalism, Adam’s Foreword is thus one of the important frames for reading the chapters that follow.
Another text that undergirds many of the chapters in our book is Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), which—in contrast to pervasive media representations of climate change—casts a long view back in order to look ahead. Through the concept of “slow violence,” defined as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon, 2011, p. 2), Nixon emphasizes how “time becomes an actor in complicated ways” when climate change is represented outside of a “breaking news” format (Nixon, 2011, p. 11). Indeed, Nixon (2011, p. 11) articulates that
the explicitly temporal emphasis of slow violence allows us to keep front and center the representational challenges and imaginative dilemmas posed not just by imperceptible violence but by imperceptible change whereby violence is decoupled from its original causes by the workings of time.
A core challenge for climate journalism (as with other types of reporting), therefore, is the task of “re-coupling” cause with disparate impacts. A central issue is that the perceived invisibility and incrementality of climate change, as discussed above, is actually an indication of privilege among those doing the reporting and defining. The question of whose perspectives and histories determine how climate change is reported and defined and whose do not, is an issue of power.
Foucault (1980, p. 96) defines “power” as “capillary” in nature. Power does not operate via a simple top-down mechanism but rather, involves both discursive and non-discursive “techniques and tactics” of control forged through notions of absolute “right” and “truth” (Foucault, 1980, p. 102). The concept of slow violence implicitly highlights this and offers a conceptual framework for determining how dominant regimes of climate change representation come to be. Indeed, in contrast with some scholarly and journalistic claims, climate change is a highly visible and present part of everyday life for the most vulnerable and marginalized (Davis and Todd, 2017; Callison, 2017; Vergès, 2017). This is, in a sense, the underbelly of industrial time as described by Adam, and reveals how imperial processes of excavation, accumulation, and occupation are unevenly felt and disparately recognized. This is a topic that often rises to the surface in connection with global, diplomatic meetings seeking to balance causation and costs related to the mitigation of climate change. But it is also an element of the broader narratives that ascribe meaning to climate change within various cultural contexts (Callison, 2017, 2014).
To this end, many of the chapters in this volume center on critical cultural studies of media. Informed by postcolonial, Indigenous, feminist, and radical theories of discourse and power, these contributions recognize the pivotal need for the field of climate communication to analyze how and why journalistic representations of climate change often erase the experiences and perspectives of the most impacted and historically marginalized communities from coverage. As opposed to interrogating inequities of impact and investigating systems of power and governance, predominant forms of climate journalism tend to obscure the specificities required for accountability and eventually, political change. We understand the temporality of news media as a core problematic that needs to be grappled with in order to produce a more transformative climate coverage and yet, time remains understudied in the field of environmental communication and journalism studies. At the outset and throughout our editing process, we wanted our volume to work towards filling this void through geographically and culturally diverse engagements with climate journalism and time.
In some sense, we understand our volume as a step away from the “science communication” approach that dominates the field of climate communication, and towards a different, broader and more critical lens that centers issues of temporal translation, knowledge, and power. Indeed, we contend that climate change is a crisis that defies the unilateral scope of “science communication”—a scholarly tradition predominantly developed and deployed by researchers trained in the West or in Western schools of thought. This tradition is preoccupied with “accuracy” and whether or not scientific facts and figures are correctly translated by journalists (Boykoff and Boykoff, 2004). This preoccupation limits research on climate journalism to the study of information transfer, and often pushes to the background more critical questions of knowledge production. By centering temporality, our volume seeks to elevate these critical questions by engaging with processes of meaning-making, systems of power, and movements for climate justice. Adam also points in this direction when she writes that the temporalities of climate change require “shifts in mediation practices from event-based reporting of isolated facts to interpretation and from description of factual evidence to historical, projective and normative analyses.”
Grounded by specific case studies, our volume’s chapters—both individually and as a collection—offer informed critiques of actually existing climate journalism as well as possible avenues for change. By “change” we mean that which brings about systemic transformations and more democratic, equitable, and just forms of reporting. This definition contrasts with the top-down vision often advanced by science communication scholars who privilege a “problem-solving” approach aimed at “fixing” the “broken” transfer of information from the top to the “masses” at the bottom (Pepermans and Maeseele, 2016). As outlined briefly above, scholars who adhere to a science communication approach tend to overlook how and why certain “messages” and “solutions”—such as technological or market mechanisms—are elevated as superior above, for instance, community-designed responses that center climate justice and equity (Callison, 2014; Carvalho, 2010; Maeseele and Raeijmaekers, 2017).
Through a focus on temporality, this volume offers a different approach to the study of climate journalism. Each chapter in our book understands journalism as more than a medium for message dissemination, in the sense that journalism also plays into larger questions of accountability. The centrality of accountability is foregrounded in our lead chapter by one of the leading scholars in the field of climate change journalism, Candis Callison, who inflects climate journalism through the lens of Indigenous knowing and practices (in North America) and thus raises important questions about the role of past absences and inequalities in journalistic renderings of the climate crisis. This focus on environmental justice and the slow and fast violences of imperial capitalism that impact Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) to a greater degree, is an important reference point for the sections that follow: “Editorial interventions and temporal (mis)translations,” “Ecological loss,” and “Temporalities of politics and religion.”
The first section, “Editorial interventions and temporal (mis)translations,” contains four chapters each focusing on how various temporalities play into established journalistic norms in different locations. The first chapter by Chloë Salles, “Advocating for journalistic urgency to include climate emergency: the case of three French media collectives,” analyzes some of the peculiarities of climate change journalism by studying three media collectives with participants from France that each share the goal of elevating issues of climate change across French media. A key issue here is how the different but collaborating institutions and representatives within the collectives negotiate urgency and emergency in different ways. The next chapter, “Climate change news in Spanish-language social media videos: format, content, and temporality” by Leonor Solís-Rojas, analyzes the content and temporal directions of Spanish-language social media news videos and argues, among other things, that this under-examined yet widely consumed media format may have more potential to represent the temporal complexities of climate change than often assumed. The third chapter by Hanna E. Morris, “Generational anxieties in United States climate journalism,” analyzes the complexities of generational time in journalistic mediations of climate change by examining TIME cover stories that spotlight Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greta Thunberg. A key issue under critical investigation in this chapter is how the trope of “generational conflict” is used by journalists to explain contemporary climate politics as opposed to cross-generational and intersectional movements for climate justice. The last chapter in this section, “Reproducing the politics of climate change in Thai newspapers” by Duangkaew Dhiensawadkij, focuses on how Thai journalism reflects official government interests by inscribing ...
