Gasping for the Oxygen of Publicity

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once famously declared that 'we're all green now'. Indeed, opinion polls regularly suggest that the majority of British people regard themselves as 'environmentalists'. Surely this has been a sign of the green movement's success? A qualified 'yes' is in order. Public awareness of environmental problems in the modern era can arguably be traced back to the publication of Rachel Carson's seminal 1962 book Silent Spring, which eloquently and authoritatively warned of the growing dangers of DDT and other chemicals in the environment. Fears regarding exhaustion of the earth's natural resources, pollution of the seas and extinction of species attracted some media attention in subsequent decades. In the 1980s, public concern was heightened by news of the destruction of the ozone layer and the possibility of devastating climate change. Since then, however, there has been a dearth of sustained public debate on environmental topics - except for genetically modified food, which we will consider in a moment.

Business has helped shape the terms of this non-debate. If we examine the corporate sector, as Andrew Rowell did in Green Backlash and Sharon Beder in Global Spin, we see that it has become the norm for business to adopt a green veneer, courtesy of expensive public relations, without actually replacing damaging business practices with ecologically sustainable activities. US business spends an estimated $500 million every year in greenwashing. In 1998 it was reported that Shell and BP 'spend seven times more on advertising their green credentials than they spend on environmental projects'.

As with industry PR, so it is with the media's apparent reflection of public concern about green issues: more gloss than substance. Whenever the mainstream media serve up stories about 'the environment', a curious blinkered view prevails. First, the environment is tidily swept into a corner away from the 'real' bread and butter issues: interest rates, superpower posturing, corporate take-overs and personality politics. Instead, environmental stories are prostituted into bland news-bites or media-friendly picture stories, and often portrayed as the remit of 'single-issue' (media-speak for 'narrow-minded') mainstream environmental pressure groups such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the World Wide Fund for Nature. Second, the media - and for that matter, the worlds of business and conventional politics - appear incapable of treating the environment as a core political theme. The green view that 'the environment' encapsulates humanity's intimate relationship with the planet is one which the media seem incapable of acknowledging, far less portraying in depth.

Take climate change: the greatest environmental threat facing humanity. The 2500-member Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that stabilising global temperatures requires a 60-80 per cent cut in the emission of greenhouse gases. At Kyoto in 1997 developed countries struggled to agree on a 5.2 per cent cut. And even that puny target has yet to be ratified by the requisite number of governments. Meanwhile, according to climate scientist Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia, we are already in a new climate regime that has been 'tainted' by industrial society. 'There is no longer such a thing', says Hulme, 'as a purely natural weather event'.

Do broadcasters and newspapers reflect the scale and urgency of this problem? Not at all. The respected London-based Global Commons Institute estimates that there will be more than two million deaths from climate change-related disasters worldwide over the next ten years. Damage to property will amount to hundreds of billions of dollars. How many people know that even though the Kyoto deal is often lauded as a 'vital first step', it falls vastly short of the cuts in fossil-fuel use that have to be made now in order to stabilise global warming? The occasional superficial newspaper report of climate scientists' warnings or dramatic footage of hurricane devastation on TV is a pitiful response.

And yet, the media prides itself on its 'balance'. A revealing view of just where this balance lies was given by Edwards following the broadcast of the anti-green Channel 4 series Against Nature in the UK. Responding to criticism, Michael Jackson, Chief Executive of Channel 4, wrote: 'The small but significant group of people who hold views opposed to the environmental lobby have rarely been seen on British television'. As Edwards adds wryly, 'Can we assume, then, that TV advertisers - say, petrochemical, automobile, atomic energy, fast food and retail corporations - are not expressing views "opposed to the environmental lobby"?'.

For the environmental lobby, making an impression on the mainstream media is a constant battle involving clever campaigning, dramatic photo-opportunities, a never-ending stream of professional press releases, constant badgering of journalists (and supporters for yet more donations) and, often, sophisticated research which is more credible than government or industry pronouncements. It is a competition that pressure groups with scant resources can ill afford to participate in, while the larger groups rarely question the terms of the media game in which they are trapped, usually unwittingly.

Why should this be so? To answer this, we must return to the propaganda model [See: 'The Propaganda Model: An Overview'] which explains the 'specific inability of the mass media to report the systematic links between the West and human rights abuses in the Third World'. Such abuses aside, what about reporting of industrial pollution, the worldwide loss of biodiversity and global warming? Edwards' answer is disturbing: 'The same is true for business-unfriendly environmental issues. Environmentalists - no matter how accurate or brilliant their facts and ideas - will always encounter obstacles to the communication of messages which threaten state and business interests'. Investigative journalism into corporate greed for profit at the expense of people and the planet is therefore largely missing from our news reports.

Is it not significant that even the largest non-governmental organisations with relatively secure funding - Oxfam, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, WWF - constantly struggle to attract media coverage in the belief that we have a free press? As Peter Melchett, then executive director of Greenpeace UK, wrote in 1998, 'it's been a good year, but what's been frustrating is that we're not doing enough to get the message of our successes over in the media, or to people more generally'. It's a perfect example of activists not recognising the structural constraints of the media, and heaping blame upon themselves for 'not doing enough'.

One wonders whether Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and other NGOs shouldn't devote at least some of their campaigning skills to lifting the lid on the 'free' press. The propaganda model reveals that constraints in the mass media necessarily limit the impact of environmental activism. Surely this is of crucial importance to environmentalists? A twin-pronged approach is possible whereby pressure groups campaign on environmental issues using the mass media where possible - there are sympathetic journalists and editors - but also highlight mass media biases, omissions and deceptions. Most NGOs ignore or neglect the latter. When I asked Friends of the Earth's press officer why this was so, I was told that the pressure group would 'have to divert scarce campaigning resources' and that, in any case, FoE's current media strategy enables them 'to punch above their weight'. To accept the argument that the mass media is an integral component of mass human and environmental rights abuses, and yet refrain from bringing it to the public's attention, is surely an odd position. Would it really involve so many precious resources to raise the topic amongst NGO supporters, publish the occasional article in their own newsletters or magazines, mention it in context when being interviewed, and so on? One wonders whether there has ever been any major debate in any of the NGOs about the propaganda model.

Greens, anti-globalisation activists and corporate critics are used to minimal or zero coverage. So any media coverage tends to be received gratefully, even if it is given the appalling seriousness of the human-rights abuses and environmental threats facing us. Nonetheless, a basic understanding of the propaganda model should be in the tool kit of every socially-engaged citizen. Campaign issues such as pollution, global warming, ozone depletion or species depletion are important. But also important is the structure of the corporate media which processes, filters and distorts these issues. This structure is a crucial cog in the profit-driven system that created the need for such campaigns in the first place. Only by understanding this can we hope to overcome the systemic bias of the corporate media which continues to block public understanding of the plunder of the planet and ways to combat it.

However, it is extremely difficult to break through the prevalent belief that the mass media represent a reasonably level playing field of news, opinions and ideas. Confronting one's own deeply-held assumptions about the world around us can be disconcerting, even traumatic. It is therefore not surprising that campaigners are often unwilling to contemplate the notion that there is an inherent media resistance to their message. It is also not surprising that activists who may be aware of the propaganda model, have often not grasped it. They have gleaned from the mass media the damning and false impression that 'big companies try to control the news in their favour'. This is the 'conspiracy' charge that Herman and Chomsky cogently refuted from day one. The view of Andy Neather, then editor of Earth Matters, Friends of the Earth's magazine, is illustrative:

'All national papers and most regional dailies, as well as all serious national broadcast news media, have environmental correspondents; a sheaf of cuttings on environmentally-related stories, many of them generated by environmental pressure groups, lands on my desk every morning.'

The proliferation of environmental correspondents and 'environmentally-related stories' is tendered as proof positive that all is basically well in the media world; but the content, context and depth of the reporting - or lack thereof - is apparently not of primary concern. Moreover, the number of environment correspondents is far outweighed by the number of news, business and financial correspondents promoting business as usual. In any case, as Beder points out: 'Environmental reporting emphasizes individual action rather than underlying social forces and issues'. She provides an example: 'A current-affairs TV show may expose corporation X for spewing toxic waste into the local waterway, but it will seldom look at the way corporations have lobbied to weaken the legislation preventing such dumping'.

Have I exaggerated the media problem? Is it really that awful? Some will counter that the issue of genetically modified food - an environmental cause célèbre, if ever there was one - has been one of the biggest media stories of recent years. Well, there is no denying the explosion of newsprint and airtime devoted to GM issues, at least in Europe, beginning in 1998. Many sections of the mainstream media quickly picked up on the public's unease on genetic engineering and ran with it. It was significant that in the UK even the right-wing Daily Mail and the Daily Express, not normally noted for their environmental stances, took up a very clear anti-GM position. Biotech corporations - Monsanto, in particular - were hammered. New Labour - and Prime Minister Tony Blair himself - had the biggest PR disaster to date. Surely the media handling of the GM story blows the propaganda model out of the water? Not at all. Recall that we are not talking here about blatant, crude suppression of radical and green views. Nor is the press uniformly submissive to business interests, especially when confronted by massive public concern on an issue.

But is it not significant that even major pressure groups had to campaign solidly against genetic engineering for anything up to 10 years before much media interest was generated? Sue Mayer worked on GM issues with Greenpeace in the early nineties when they were struggling to attract any media attention at all. Mayer says that 'They [the press] had to reflect the interest and information from public interest groups forcing it onto the agenda'. Previously the media 'were extremely unwilling to look behind the hype of the companies and the hype of the scientists until they were forced to'.

Moreover, much of the mainstream reporting on GM - again there are exceptions - treated it as a consumer story. Issues relating to the undermining of Third World agriculture and corporate dominance of the food chain were under-reported - in particular, moves by western corporations to control the supply of seed to peasant farmers. Significantly, negative reporting of activists who destroyed GM crops at test sites was common in the press, with much bandying around of pejorative terms such as 'vandals' and 'terrorists'. Andrew Rowell notes that: 'It is becoming increasingly difficult to get hard-hitting current affairs stories that have an in-depth understanding of environmental, development or human rights issues into the media, especially broadcast media.' Rowell, who has worked for The Guardian newspaper in Britain, added, 'All too often environmental issues are still ignored as editors fight for a quick popular headline'.

The dismissive response of many activists, such as FoE's Andy Neather, to the propaganda model is telling. It is consistent with the notion that to those inside the media system - whether journalists, PR executives or even well-intentioned professional environmentalists - not only is the freedom of the press taken more or less for granted, but that the very concept of a propaganda model can be rejected without thought. In an interview, Chomsky commented as follows on the reaction of 'liberals' and others who fail to engage with the argument that there are structural constraints in the media which limit the impact of dissident thinking and activism:

'Somehow they have to get rid of the stuff [dissident arguments]. [They] can't deal with the arguments, that's plain, for one thing you have to know something, and most of these people don't know anything. Secondly, you wouldn't be able to answer the arguments because they're correct. Therefore what you have to do is somehow dismiss it. So that's one technique, "It's just emotional, it's irresponsible, it's angry".'

Throughout this book, I frequently cite mainstream news sources: the BBC, The Independent and The Guardian, for example. Other media critics, such as Chomsky, also reference mainstream press and broadcasting for at least some of their facts. This encourages dismissive critics of the propaganda model to conclude triumphantly that the model is false, and that media coverage of crucial issues is indeed reasonably fair and accurate. But as Herman and Chomsky point out, this is a 'classic non sequitur'. The important point here is: what context and attention are provided by the mass media for any given fact? What is the framework within which it is presented? Are related facts, which might elucidate or contradict the meaning, presented also? An honest appraisal would conclude that 'there is no merit to the pretense that because certain facts may be found in the media by a diligent and skeptical researcher, the absence of radical bias and de facto suppression is thereby demonstrated'.

In The Compassionate Revolution, David Edwards draws parallels with the lack of mainstream scrutiny of corporate abuse of people and corporate abuse of the environment, while emphasising that the mass media are not 'monolithic'. Occasionally, the truth does shine through, but with one important proviso: 'Reporting will S always be sporadic and lacking the sort of historical background and rational framework that might allow us to understand the systemic and institutionalized links between the West and Third World human rights abuses' or, for that matter, between the West and global environmental degradation.

[The above article is an extract from 'Spotlight on the Media': Chapter 3 of 'Private Planet' (Jon Carpenter Publishing, 2001). See http://www.private-planet.com for more about the book.]