Media monopolies, digital democracy, cultural clashes - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 216

interest and reporting on complicated, long-running and crucial envi-
ronmental problems. They also criticised the strong representation - or
even domination - of the political and economic powers in the framing
of and access to the media when environmental issues are concerned.
And these studies took notice of the near absence of environmental sen-
sitivities in the main - nonenvironmental - news reporting and news
consumption. Notwithstanding these critical lines, if one has to draw
one conclusion out of all these media studies on the environment up
to the late 1990s, it should be that the environment became an estab-
lished part of everyday journalism and media reporting, without one
single overarching and dominant environmental perspective, framing
or discourse. 2 In that sense, from an environmental point of view, the
media matured. But, in addition, the media also transformed - along
three lines - in a period that has been labelled the Information Age,
and these changes have been reflected less strongly in environmental
media studies until now.
First, with the growing importance of information in various
domains, including environmental protection, struggles and controver-
sies have relocated strongly to the media. Second, with globalisation
and privatisation, the nation-state container becomes less and less rele-
vant for analysing and understanding - also the environmental dimen-
sions of - the media. And, finally, environmental media studies have
to take the emerging new technologies - or, rather, new media, - into
account. The Internet, cyberspace, new telecommunication technolo-
gies and satellites (the new media) are reforming the 'old' media -
environment interactions. The consequence is that the media have to
be analysed increasingly as a complex system, a mediascape, in which
products, production and reception are part of a structured but con-
stantly changing global networked system. In global mediatized infor-
mation flows through these networks, simple schemes of clearly sep-
arated actor roles (producers, transmitters and consumers/recipients),
and state governance are no longer adequate.
While most environmental scholars would easily agree on the grow-
ing importance of and complexities in various media in most social

2

Hannigan ( 2006 : 89-92) provides an interesting analysis of quite contrasting
tendencies that can be witnessed in the mainstreaming of environment in the
media, such as scientific objectivism vis- a-vis extreme subjectivism, and greening
business and economics versus apocalyptic environmental reporting. In that
sense, the media do reflect a variety of societal ideologies and frames.