Environmental Engineering Reference
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a reasonable chance of spill-over to the conventional media, strongly
enhancing the powers of transparency and accountability? Or will the
old media, with its inequalities in information and news production,
definition and transmittance, become a dominant factor in shaping and
structuring the new media?
6. Conclusion: media as governance, governance of the media
In the Information Age, the media has become a key player in environ-
mental governance, as much as it has become a key factor in many other
fields. In searching for informational governance in environmental pro-
tection we cannot but acknowledge the fact that environmental gover-
nance has become mediatised. But, at the same time, the media can no
longer be simply seen as a limited set of multinational players that have
an all-encompassing power over key governing processes. Of course,
power in the mediascape is unequally distributed, with too much in the
hands of a few multinational media monopolies or oligopolies. But this
is not the essence of the role of the media in contemporary environ-
mental governance. Rather than interpreting media companies as key
actors that govern environmental (non)protection, the media should
be seen as a key battlefield on which environmental politics, conflicts
and priority setting are increasingly being settled. In addition, the con-
ventional media of television, radio and the written press are more and
more challenged by - and integrated with - the new media, which sig-
nificantly changes the mediascape. The power balances around these
new media are not settled yet, and states, old media conglomerates
and a wide set of new actors appear on the production, distribution
and consumption stage of these new media, among them environmen-
tal advocates. In these new settings, and especially with respect to the
new media, actors become integrated entities, switching between pro-
ducers, distributors and consumers/audience of news and information.
One could indeed label that democratisation, but of a specific kind, as
many are still excluded. A more critical analysis would instead point
at new lines of inequality, now strongly defined by new media ratio-
nalities.
So, the key question increasingly becomes: how is the media gov-
erned? Although throughout this topic we have become aware of how
important processes of transparency, verification, disclosure, accessi-
bility and accountability are in the new forms of environmental gover-
nance, and that the - old and new - media play a key role in this,
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