Author: Alison Anderson
Subject: Media Studies/Journalism/Environmental Studies
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2394-X
Paperback ISBN 0-8135-2395-8
Pages: 224 pp. 20 b & w illus.
Description: One of the first books to combine media and environmental studies.

Communications, Media, and Culture Series

George F. Custen, Series Editor

Are you getting the real news on environmental issues? Or are the reports you are hearing slanted to meet the special interests of the reporters? The government? A lobbying group? How are our views on the Torrey Canyon oil spill, the demise of Brazilian rain forests, or the Chernobyl disaster shaped by individuals or organizations that know how to use the media to best deliver their message?

Media, Culture and the Environment provides an accessible introduction to key issues and debates surrounding the media politics of risk assessment and the environment. Anderson looks at nature as contested terrain and reveals how news sources use it to compete for our emotions and attention. She shows how framings of risk in relation to the environment are influenced by social, political, and cultural factors, but she also rejects extreme versions of social constructionism.

The book moves beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries by synthesizing recent debates in cultural theory and media studies with key developments in human geography. It offers an in-depth analysis of pressure politics and environmental lobbying groups, while examining the production, transmission and negotiation language of news discourse. The examples, drawn from both Europe and North America, include the tremendous headline controversies over oil spills and the killing of baby seals. Difficult issues, clearly surveyed and incisively presented, make this book essential reading for anyone interested in how and why journalists handle environmental news in the ways that they do.

"A rigorous and important contribution to this significant new dimension of media studies. The book's international scope and sophisticated treatment of the social construction of the environment will make it valuable to scholars and students in communication, journalism, cultural studies and related fields."

-Mike Budd, Florida Atlantic University

Alison Anderson is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Plymouth in England.