Media monopolies, digital democracy, cultural clashes - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 229

of information, the conventional media (press and television) and the
new media have become crucial resources and battlegrounds, and this
also redefines the strategies and activities of new social movements. But
it does not turn new social movements into cultural movements, and
one should not explain these developments in terms of a new culture
of protest and engagement.
In analysing the media resources and battlegrounds, the old media
differ strongly form the new media. The conventional media have
always been looked on by the environmental - and other social -
movements with suspicion. These media were and still are seen as a
homogeneous, hostile force, which rather misrepresents and distorts
the messages of the movement, while leaning particularly strongly on
governments and corporations in news reporting. Conventional media
tend to induce professional management of the media, professional and
private ownership of the media, and concentration of the media in a few
hands that run to a major extent parallel with capital. But, at the same
time, and increasingly from the late 1970s onwards, the environmental
movement became fundamentally dependent on the mainstream mass
media, as these media turned out to be a strategic resource. Without
this mass media, the (Western) environmental movement was probably
not able to develop so rapidly and could not have such an influence
in the national and global political game. The current environmental
battles for media attention and information dissemination to the public
is characterised by professionalisation, a protest business, a growing
similarity between commercial campaigns and those of environmen-
talists, and the prevalence of form over substance. The classic exam-
ple of this is Greenpeace's media campaign concerning the Brent Spar
(cf. Bennie, 1998 ;deJong, 2005 ; for more general press coverage of
Greenpeace, see Hansen, 1993a ). A more recent, but even more power-
ful, example is the 2006/2007 media campaign around and by Al Gore's
Oscar-winning movie/documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which
caused major accelerations in the climate change agenda-building, poli-
cies and measures worldwide. 8 Contradictory to the Brent Spar case

8

An Inconvenient Truth followed to a major extent the logic of conventional
media conglomerates, with large funding and a highly professionalised media
campaign. But, at the same time, it was more a documentary than a movie, and
in that sense it was very different from the 2004 Twentieth Century Fox movie
The Day after Tomorrow, which also addressed climate change issues but did
not have this tremendous and global impact.