Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
village, but produce differentiated products adapted to place-bound
characteristics for different audiences. As such, media politics includes
both oppression and resistance, as Castells ( 1996 /1997) illustrated
so colourfully in his opus magnus. So it should not surprise us, as
Stevenson ( 2001 ) shows in reviewing the various interpretations and
judgements of the current developments in and of the media, that one
can find media pessimists and optimists, criticism and praise, of all
sorts from all kind of political directions.
With the media as a new battleground, rather than just a Fourth
Estate, the crucial position journalists had is changing as well. How
should we define the role of journalism in the Information Age? Many
agree that the traditional role of journalists and news editors as gate-
keepers to the world is no longer adequate and preferred in an age
marked by both global commercial media monopolies and the diffu-
sion (or even democratisation) of information production and con-
sumption via the World Wide Web. 6 Others even doubt whether jour-
nalists and newsworkers, even if they would prefer to continue in those
roles, would be able to play such a role in current times. In analysing
the information and communication flows around the Starr report (in
1998) 7 and the 9/11 event (in 2001) in the United States, McPhail
( 2006 : 301) concludes:
The important communication point to be made in all of this is that no longer
news editors, pundits, politicians, the US president, or others are able to act
as gatekeepers to restrict, alter, spin, or limit the information in the report.
Rather, millions of average people around the world now have access to the
full, unedited, government reports at the same time they are presented to the
national legislatures.
If these conventional roles of journalists as newsbringers and gatekeep-
ers are no longer valid, what are then new roles for (environmental)
6
In stressing the consequences of commercialisation in the media, Paehlke ( 2003 :
80-81) quotes from a survey among journalists in the United States: 40 percent
of the journalists practice self-censorship by not covering stories that might
offend advertisers or the owners of their news organizations; 52 percent
avoided too-complex stories; 77 percent turned away from stories that were
important but dull. These figures should not be too surprising for
environmentalists having experience with the difficulties of getting complex and
unwelcome environmental messages across mass media.
7
The report of the independent counsel Kenneth Starr on the Monica Lewinsky
affair, which was followed by an impeachment procedure on U.S. president Bill
Clinton.
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