NATURE’S PRINCIPAL PUBLIC REPRESENTATIVE: THE MASS MEDIA - Making Sense of Nature - page 243

otherwise their influence on us can be detrimental. I want now to consider
how our existential condition of epistemic dependence can be turned to
our collective advantage, even as it presents the ever-present risk that we are
misdirected by others.
ENDNOTES
1 These media, to reiterate Latourian language used in Chapter 3, are a combination of
'immutable mobiles' and 'immutable immobiles'.
2 This said, even the 'mainstream' mass media in a country can be highly differenti-
ated such that people living in different areas are offered a very different mainstream
media menu. This, arguably, is true of the United States, which has a highly privatised
media industry in which numerous local, regional and national providers compete
with public and other not-for-profit providers.
3 I place all these terms in scare-quotes because, in practice, even the 'serious' parts of
the media are arguably engaged in all three things simultaneously - they're not readily
separated. Two graphic illustrations of this are Kate Evans's seriously amusing comic
Funny weather (Evans, 2007) and Randy Olson's Global warming comedy (2008).
4 This need is not only about information dissemination, i.e. ensuring those being
governed get the necessary messages from their governments; it's also a need for
social integration and cohesion, with the mass media ensuring a degree of com-
mon knowledge and experience among otherwise different and physically separated
citizens.
5 For a readable survey of (largely) mainstream approaches to understanding 'media
effects', see the collection edited by Jennings Bryant and Mary Oliver (2009). For
a more inclusive survey, I recommend The Sage handbook of media processes and effects
(Nabi and Oliver, 2009).
6 One of the foci of recent research into the vibrancy of civil societies is what happens
when a country experiences rapid immigration and thus undergoes diversification in
a religious, cultural and ethnic sense. Does civil society become weaker or does it
become more fragmented, a set of islands whose inhabitants are tight knit but which
exclude 'outsiders'? This is something American political scientist Robert Putnam
has long been interested in, suggesting that 'bridging capital' between very different
citizens can weaken, even as 'in group' 'bonding capital' remains strong.
7 Another important threat, to which I alluded near the end of Chapter 3 , is a public
that's cynical about, or detached from, or simply too pressed for time to focus on
public affairs.
8 Doublespeak is language that deliberately disguises, distorts or reverses the conven-
tional meanings and referents of words. It often takes the form of euphemisms (e.g.
'downsizing' for laying off workers), making the truth less unpleasant without denying
its nature. It may also be deployed as intentional ambiguity or reversal of meaning
(e.g. favouring 'climate change' over the more graphic terminology 'global warming').
The charge that the contemporary news media are debasing the public sphere is made
with some passion by journalist Dan Hind (2010) in The return of the public .Non-profit
organisations like the Center for Media & Democracy (based in the United States)
now exist to try to expose and counter some of the more self-serving uses of spin and
public relations in the corporate and political worlds.
9 Even those who disbelieve the claims made by most climate scientists that the bio-
physical world we inhabit will change dramatically from hereon will, I argue, have to
reckon with global climate change. The discourse about it will not go away any time
soon, especially if some of the predicted biophysical changes occur perceptibly in the
short to medium term.
10 There's another norm I've not mentioned, but which is important to securing pub-
lic trust in the news media: the norm of abiding by the law when researching and