Media and Environment: Conflict, Politics and the News

New
Paperback
2010
$22.48

Conflict over issues such as climate change, toxic waste and wilderness provides a key site for examining the shaping and negotiation of public debate. This book offers a new understanding of the relationship between media roles and environmental futures, and of the ways in which news works to influence environmental decision-making across boundaries and over time. Drawing on a range of international examples, Dr Libby Lester invites readers to develop a nuanced understanding of changing media practices and dynamics by connecting local, national and global environmental issues, journalistic practices and news sources, public relations and protests, and the symbolic and strategic circulation of meanings in the public sphere. Media and Environment argues that news maintains a central role in environmental politics. As such, it asks about our understandings of place and community, of local responsibility and global citizenship, and how communication as a society on these crucial issues affects our lives, now and into the future.

Synopsis

Conflict over issues such as climate change, toxic waste and wilderness provides a key site for examining the shaping and negotiation of public debate. This book offers a new understanding of the relationship between media roles and environmental futures, and of the ways in which news works to influence environmental decision-making across boundaries and over time. Drawing on a range of international examples, Dr Libby Lester invites readers to develop a nuanced understanding of changing media practices and dynamics by connecting local, national and global environmental issues, journalistic practices and news sources, public relations and protests, and the symbolic and strategic circulation of meanings in the public sphere. Media and Environment argues that news maintains a central role in environmental politics. As such, it asks about our understandings of place and community, of local responsibility and global citizenship, and how communication as a society on these crucial issues affects our lives, now and into the future.

$22.48

Quantity

10 in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 200
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 05 Nov 2010
ISBN 10: 0745644023
ISBN 13: 9780745644028

Media Reviews

Media and Environment offers a comprehensive discussion of approaches, methods and outcomes in research on media and environmental conflict, from a multidisciplinary, but nevertheless fundamentally sociological perspective. The book offers an excellent insight into the processes driving news coverage of environmental conflict, as well as into ways of conceptualizing the interplay of news, publics and political action. It will be a welcome addition to this burgeoning field of study. Anders Hansen, University of Leicester At a time when the global scale of environmental issues insisits upon public attention and action, the news institutions that report these issues have come under singular economic pressure. Libby lester writes a theoretically sophisticated and lucid analysis of the mediated construction of the public discourse on environmental risk under these conditions and of the political interests of the key players in this essential debate. Andrew Rojecki, University of Illinois at Chicago As we teeter on the brink of environmental apocalypse, we may wonder: how did we get here? Libby Lester's insightful analysis of the role of news media in constructing our understanding of the multiple environmental crises engulfing the earth provides important clues. Through her global perspective on why we get the environmental news coverage that we do, Lester gives us some hope for charting a new direction. Kevin DeLuca, University of Utah

Author Bio

Libby Lester is Associate Professor of Journalism, Media and Communications at the University of Tasmania