Media monopolies, digital democracy, cultural clashes - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 228

journalists? Glasser and Craft ( 1998 ) refer to the emergence of public
journalism in the late 1980s in the United States, where journalists and
the media have a role to play in revitalising the quality of the public dis-
course and with that of an active democracy. Bardoel ( 1996 ) sees a new
role for journalists as information brokers, providing functional and
specialized information to interested citizen-consumers. Others draw
even more radical consequences from the fact that there are no longer
any gates to keep. The Internet contains the multiplication of informa-
tion sources as well as information producers; thus, the emergence of
People's Journalism. If anything, journalists have only a (public) service
role to play, in bringing together the various sources with the various
consumers (Yelvington, 1999 ), as facilitators of public discussions, as
connectors between supply and demand (Aufderheide, 1998 ), as the
ones opening up critical questions for discussion (Stevenson, 2001 ).
With the evaporation of these last authorities and landmarks in the
information and media arena, news and information can indeed best
be understood as fluid flows of information without any predetermined
routes, node and networks and without any clear centre of governance
or control.
5. Environmental politics and the media
How do these developments and transformations in the media work
out for environmental governance? What is the relevance of all this for
understanding informational governance of the environment?
In assessing and explaining what they call the 'culturist turn' in
recent political campaigns and collective actions of environmentalists
and other movements (such as those of the anti- or other globaliza-
tion movement; cf. Chapter 8 ), Scott and Street ( 2001 : 45ff) turn away
from a cultural explanation. According to them, the fact that environ-
mentalists and other social movements turn away from political insti-
tutions, political structures and political actors as the focus of their
activities, claims and strategies and move towards the media, the form
and visualisation of their messages, the clashes of different cultures
and an emphasis on blaming and shaming the economic and political
powers against universal norms and values should not be explained in
cultural terms but in 'classic' terms. New resources, new rules of the
'political' game and new opportunity structures lead new social move-
ments to redirect their focus, strategy and collective actions. In an age