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mainstream mass media might otherwise ignore. Such alternative media
promise to democratise and diversify the diet of information, argument and
experience available to people living in all parts of the globe. They often
push the envelope in a cognitive, moral or aesthetic sense.
However, various national surveys reveal the tenacity of the mainstream
media. When asked, even people living in very 'media-rich' environments
report that they derive most of their media content from a small number
of established newspapers, television channels, radio stations and web-
sites. Relatedly, Paul Watson, the famously radical leader of direct-action
environmental organisation Sea Shepherd, observes that:
New media is increasingly important, but the mainstream media is still very
much the main game of the environmental campaigns. You do the ground
work; you build the community of opposition. That's the foundation, but then
the icing on the cake is still mainstream media opinion. That's just how it is
and that's okay.
(Quoted in Lester and Hutchins, 2009: 588)
Generalising, Watson's point is that messages, performances or events
that don't get channelled through the mainstream mass media are unlikely
to be noticed by more than a niche audience, and a potentially small one
at that. To be
too
'alternative' is to risk being cut off entirely from the social
mainstream. In this light, we might say that alternative media have enriched
the epistemic ecology in which mainstream media function, without yet
ending their ecological dominance. Large media organisations, most of
which are private profit-seeking ones with a minority being publicly owned
or otherwise not-for-profit, continue to supply the overwhelming volume
of mass mediated words, sounds and sights that people the world-over
Accordingly, in this chapter I want to focus on how the mainstream
media represents the world to its (very large) audiences. I'll concentrate on
the 'serious' (non-fictional) parts of the mainstream, which is to say those
engaged largely in the business of 'informing' rather than 'entertaining' or
important genre of representation, taking their reporting of global climate
change as an instructive illustration of their working practices. Before I do
so, however, I need to make some general observations about the role the
mass media play in contemporary societies. This will be the focus of the first
two sections of this chapter.
LIVING IN A MASS MEDIATED WORLD
'Much everyday interaction', writes media theorist John Thompson,
'is
“face-to-face”,
in the sense that it takes place in a localized setting in
...
which
individuals confront one another directly.' However, 'mediated
