Note: The following is the first in a series of short essays about the relationship between media, climate change, and environmental education.
by Nils Lindahl Elliot
Imagine the following scenario: the producers of an environmental radio series for a global media institution make a programme that involves travelling across a part of the United States. To do so, they hire a Chevrolet Suburban—a 5.4 metre (over 16 foot) long behemoth with a 5.3 litre engine which only does 22.4 kpg (14 mpg) in the city and 32 kpg (20 mpg) on the highways. Worse, Suburban has a carbon footprint of 11.4 tons per year (1). The programme is meant to provide an opportunity for the producers and their audiences to hear some ‘vox pops’ about the forthcoming Copenhagen Climate Change Summit.
After the programme is broadcast, several listeners contact the media institution to express their disappointment over the fact that the producers have used a Chevrolet Suburban; in their view, the programme should ‘lead by example’. The producers response is twofold: first, they were given that vehicle by the car hire company, and so, strictly speaking, they did not choose it themselves. Second, the producers explain that their programme does not seek to ‘lead by example’, and it certainly hasn’t been conceived as a way of engaging in anything like a pedagogy of environmentally friendly living. Instead, its goal is to reflect everyday relationships with the environment; if there are aspects of those relationships that upset the audience, then it is for them (the audience) to instigate change (2).
In this essay, I would like to explore the ethics of this stance. My purpose is not to suggest that the stance is ‘unethical’ (though I certainly believe it to be ‘unsustainable’), but rather to suggest that it is based on a journalistic ethos which is questionable in its own right, and probably needs to be changed in the context of the looming crisis generated by so-called ‘catastrophic change’. I will begin by representing what I assume to be the set of journalistic codes that the producers in the mentioned scenario adhere to. Thereafter, I will offer two inter-related critiques: a critique of the notion that a news and current affairs programme can simply reflect everyday relationships to the environment; and a critique of the notion that the media only teach in those cases where a producer engages in an explicitly didactical form of communication.
1. News as ‘reflection’: a defense
Public broadcasting services in the Western world have traditionally described their newsmaking in the terms of a discourse of objectivity and balance. The idea is that a journalist should act much like a scientist: s/he should observe news-worthy events, and describe their characteristics as impartially as possible for audiences. The media of mechanical (or now digital) reproduction should be employed to record such events, and to make them available, with as little editorialising intervention of the journalist as possible, to the wider world. Any intervention as does take place should be of three kinds: first, the journalist should select events deemed to be newsworthy. Second, s/he should frame such events as impartially as possible, an according to a set of pre-existing conventions (e.g. ‘realist’ forms of TV camera framing, recording a voice with a unidirectional microphone that prevents background noise from interrupting what is being said, etc. etc.). Third, any editing should obey similar principles, and should avoid editorialising; an important exception involves all those situations in which further commentary is required to provide a more accurate perspective (e.g. to correct a mistaken claim). Applied strictly and consistently, this set of codes is supposed to ensure that the coverage of news and current affairs reflects whatever is represented.
This admittedly simplified account describes what remains the predominant discourse and ethos vis-à-vis the nature of news (and mainstream forms of documentary representation) in media such as the BBC, National Public Radio and other public broadcasting services. Of course, there are some variations on this theme, and it is true that especially when it comes to certain documentary styles, there is greater leeway for what I described as an ‘editorialising’ intervention on the part of the producers. I would argue that in the case of the scenario that I described at the beginning of this essay, the producers were nevertheless referring to a version of this ‘news-must-do-no-more-than-reflect’ discourse.
There is much to be said in favour of this discourse. On the one hand, from the point of view of linguistic or semiotic theory, a strong case can certainly be made that some forms of reporting are more indexical than others. Put less technically, some forms of reporting involve a closer and more direct relationship between an empirical object of representation, and the representation.
On the other hand, the alternative to this approach is by no means unproblematic. Earlier, I suggested that this model (and it is a model) is in crisis, but the reason for this has nothing to do with climate change (though I will argue at a later stage that climate change will provoke further crisis, of a different sort). It is, instead, the outcome of the ascendance, to not say growing hegemony of media institutions which are controlled by groups that are concerned to directly intervene in the politics of countries such as the U.S., the U.K., and Australia. Such groups are subverting the mentioned ethos ‘from within’: even as they claim to be bona fide news institutions, more often than not as per the codes just described, they deliberately distort coverage of news and current affairs to reflect what are predominantly conservative, and increasingly right-wing ideologies. What was once the prerogative of tabloid forms of journalism has worked its way ‘up’ into broadsheet newspapers, and many ‘reputable’ TV and radio news programmes. As I like to remind colleagues who are dismissive of the traditional codes for newsmaking, the discourse most likely to replace it may be far, far worse.
2. News as ‘reflection’: a first critique
The subversion ‘from within’ the ‘news-must-be-objective’ discourse nonetheless begins to reveal one of its key problems: it is open to abuse, particularly in contexts where audiences are not educated to be critical media users. The same codes that ostensibly act to ensure objectivity are arguably the best cover for deliberate or inadvertent untruths. The inertia of the heavy machinery of ostensive objectivity can easily take audiences with it; a historical case in point, the famous events surrounding Orson Welles’ broadcast of the War of the Worlds.
From a more academic perspective, the ideal of impartiality can never be more than that—an ideal—for the simple reason that every aspect, every step of the news- or documentary-making process is ineluctably selective, and thereby partial. When, for example, the makers of a half-hour or hour-long radio programme set out to interview people about the views on climate change, they cannot hope to reflect the full range of views that people in a country, or even a state are likely to have. To be sure, if it is true that all media producers have to deal with constraints of time and space as a structural feature of their own newsmaking, it is also the case that when they do select some views or issues to highlight, they do so in ways that are always at once personal and social. They are personal, in the sense that they reflect their own biographies and individual trajectories; someone chooses to be somewhere at some point in time. But of course, such biographies and trajectories are ineluctably social in so far as they reflect the own background in terms of social class, gender, ethnicity, political views, etc. No action is, from this point of view, entirely voluntary, entirely the result of conscious or rational decision-making. A journalist might seek to be more reflexive and self-reflexive about her/his work, but s/he can never leave such constraints—and such conditions of possibility—behind.
A parallel argument can be made about the technology itself. Take, for example, a single TV shot of someone talking. From one perspective, it can certainly be argued—indeed it must be argued—that there is an indexical relation between the person standing in front of the camera, and the image of the person in the viewfinder. We can say, on one level at least, that there is an immediate relation between the two aspects in so far as it is true that light reflects off the person, enters the lens, enervates or otherwise activates arrays of LED’s, and then produces a certain electrical signal that reconstitutes the image on the viewfinder. There is certainly an objectivity to this process that would be foolish to deny, in the same way that it would be foolish to deny that the wind turns a weathervane, and that it does so in a certain direction and not another. This is what I (or rather Charles Sanders Peirce) mean by an ‘index’, or an ‘indexical’ relation.
But this same example can be used to prove that a TV camera is ‘mediate’, that is to say, that it does mediate whatever it represents. Even if we leave to one side the kinds of issues that were recently raised by a Hewlett-Packard camera’s inability to represent a Black man, it must still be noted that the shot is partial in at least two ways. First, the cameraperson has chosen to frame one aspect of the world, and not another. Second, when that shot is edited with another, this will be true again: the editor will choose to edit the shot as part of a certain sequence, and not another. Exactly the same can and must be made about any journalistic representation in any medium.
The upshot is that anything other than a deeply sceptical stance vis-à-vis the convention of objective newsmaking—the idea that a journalist does no more than ‘reflect’ the world—is naïve, and quite possibly, dangerous to the own and the national political health. One of my favourite recent examples of this verity takes a somewhat controversial form: in the UK, the BBC recently included for the first time, in one of its primetime TV news and current affairs programmes, the man who is arguably the leader of Britain’s leading Neo-Nazi political party. The Corporation argued that it had to do so on the grounds of its own impartiality rules; the man had been elected as a member of the European parliament, and so had a right to be heard. The programme was, however, structured as a kind of kangaroo court. The show’s format revolves around questions asked by the audience to a panel made up of leading social and political figures, with a moderator acting as a go-between; people almost literally took turns to ‘have a go’ at the politician in question. The next day most of the British establishment congratulated itself for a job well done. I very much agreed with what most people said to the Neo-Nazi, but I couldn’t help but think that what could be done to a Neo-Nazi extremist one day might equally be done to someone wrongly regarded as an ‘extremist’ environmental activist another day. Rachel Carson stands as the best example of this practice as it occurred in the United States in the early 1960s.
Just to be clear: the point is not to suggest that the programme should have been ‘balanced’, in the way that some journalists seem to think they ought to be when they interview so-called climate change ‘experts’ with crackpot, to not say deliberately deceptive arguments. It is to say that the example reflects how susceptible the notions of truth and objectivity, in journalism as in other domains, are to social consensus.
3. News as ‘reflection’: a ‘pedagogic’ critique
In this last part of the essay I want to engage more directly with what I regard as the most problematic aspect of the suggestion that certain programmes not only reflect the world (or a world), pretty much as it is, but with the notion that the programme makers have no intention of ‘leading by example’, no intention of engaging in a kind of pedagogy of environmentally sound living (or indeed any other form of living). In the first critique, I explained why news and current affairs must necessarily do more than just ‘reflect’ the world; even as news provide an index of the world, they also mediate it, which is to say they shape it according to a certain pattern of selection engaged by the journalist—a pattern that reflects, however directly or indirectly, her/his personal trajectory, which is at once a social trajectory.
I now want to argue that even as this happens, news and current affairs programmes also ‘lead by example’—or rather, they engage in what is at once an informal, and what I describe as a nonformal pedagogy.
At this point it might help to clarify what is, in fact, a three-way distinction between different modes of pedagogic practice.
A formal mode is the one traditionally found in schools, and involves a space that is not only employed for educational activities, but is recognized by the participants as being devoted to such activities. It involves an actual curriculum, and more often than not, a strong, and hierarchical separation of pedagogic roles: student, teacher, head teacher, and so forth.
An informal mode, often found in zoos, museums, biological reserves and environmental parks abandons the spatiality of schooling in favour of a practice that takes place within the context of a leisure activity. In such cases, the educator, e.g. the docent or the guide, can be said to ‘colonize’ a non-educational space with a pedagogic discourse that is ‘smuggled in’, frequently in the form of optional ‘information’ about one or another aspect of the leisure activity. I suggest that many forms of mass communication can be productively regarded as engaging in this kind of pedagogy; a case in point, the BBC’s natural history documentaries, or indeed, a radio programme that informs listeners about the views of say, a particular group of people. Note that in this mode, the ‘receivers’ or audiences are unlikely to regard themselves as being students, even though they might well agree, if quizzed, that they have learned something from the programme. An informal mode involves precisely that ‘fuzzy’ space where people learn things, but don’t think of the context as being ‘educational’, or at least, primarily educational.
What I describe, finally, as the nonformal mode refers to a pedagogic practice that may be found embedded within either of the first two modes, and involves all those situations in which something is ‘taught without being taught’, and ‘learned without being learned’. This formulation is deliberately paradoxical, and refers to the aspects of pedagogic communication which are unconscious, or at any rate, ‘unselfconscious’ to both the educator, and the educand: something is taught without being consciously taught, and something is learned without being consciously learned. I’d hasten to add that this does not necessarily mean that any learning is ‘unconscious’; it is, however, at the very least, ‘unselfconscious’. This might seem like a semantic distinction, but actually, it’s quite an important one. In my experience, things that are truly ‘unconcious’ are often not really amenable to any sort of questioning, let alone recognition (hence the years that psychotherapists spend with their clients). By contrast, what I describe as the ‘unselfconscious’ involves all those entirely tacit assumptions which are ineluctably a part of any process of communication, and of social practice more generally.
Here a good example can be found in zoos: even as a zookeeper might give an informal talk about, say, the ecology of gorillas, such a talk would have to be premised on two nonformal pedagogic assumptions: first, that one can talk about gorillas in a zoo as if they were the same as gorillas in the wild; and second, that it is OK to keep gorillas enclosed in a zoo. (I’m not arguing that it is or isn’t OK; I’m arguing that this is a kind of silent or tacit assumption that is not only ‘embedded’ in the informal discourse, but is also one that is tacitly being taught by the zoo.)
Let’s return then to the radio programme. I want to suggest that, whether a media producer likes it or not, whether s/he sets out to be ‘pedagogical’ or not, her/his/their programme is inevitably educational if only in the sense of an informal, and a nonformal mode of pedagogic practice. People can and do learn from news and current affairs, even if they don’t set out to do so; and media producers do teach things even when they don’t set out to do so.
The example of the use of the Chevrolet Suburban is as good an example as any. The use of this vehicle, like any other vehicle, has connotations, which in turn may serve a certain pedagogic function; amongst audience members that value the vehicle positively, they may serve to enhance, for example, the masculinity of the producers (or at least of the presenter), or to send a powerful signal that ‘you’re one of us’. In so doing, the choice of vehicle might reinforce the sense that it’s still OK to drive this kind of automobile, even if it is not only entirely unnecessary to do so, but even if it has particularly deleterious effects on the environment.
Amongst those that regard such vehicles as a symbol of an environmentally destructive disposition, exactly the opposite connotation may apply; for such audiences, the programme may also be ‘pedagogical’ in the way that George Orwell famously remarked with respect to the use of Rolls-Royces during WWII: ‘The lady in the Rolls Royce car is more damaging to morale than a fleet of Goering’s bombing planes’ (this quote was recently used by the journalist and environmental activist George Monbiot in a debate about Porsche ownership with London’s Mayor, Boris Johnson).
There are two points that I really want to highlight here: first, the fact that someone doesn’t set out to teach or learn something does not mean that don’t teach or learn something. And second, while it is true that producers can never entirely control meaning-making on the part of audiences, they cannot entirely divest themselves from a certain responsibility of, and for the forms they use.
Here again, the zoo example is useful. For a producer to suggest that it’s up to audiences to interpret as they will the use of the Chevrolet Suburban is no different from a zoo saying that it’s up to visitors to interpret as they will the fact that the zoo has enclosed the gorillas. On one level, this is of course a valid argument: this is what will happen, regardless. What the argument fails to acknowledge is that it is both within the power, and depending on one’s ideology, the obligation of both the zookeeper and the media producer to engage with any critique. To suggest that it’s all down to the audience’s interpretation is to engage in the kind of relativism that postmodern are often, and often rightly, upbraided for.
A similar point accrues to the suggestion that, in an era that seems headed for so-called ‘catastrophic’ climate change, its down to the audience members to determine their own stance vis-à-vis the use of fuel-thirsty or carbon-nasty vehicles. Here the more relevant parallel is found not in a zoo, but in government (some might say that in my UK, the two are not always readily distinguishable): for government to argue that it’s really down to the people to make changes in their personal lives is tantamount to denying that there are huge differences in what a government minister, and an everyday person on the street can achieve. While a radio producer is certainly not a government minister, s/he is also not your every man or woman on the street. The fact that many tens of thousands of people (or much larger numbers) might tune in to listen to a programme all across the world means that the producer’s voice has, if nothing else, a reach and a resonance that few members of the audience will have.
Just to be clear, a didacticist voice such as was once employed in public service broadcasting is certainly problematic, and it would almost certainly be a mistake to try to revert to any such mode. What is at issue is the notion that the news media simply ‘reflect’ the world, and so do not have pedagogic consequences. I hope to have shown in this essay that they do more than ‘reflect’—they also ‘shape’—and that in so doing, they may engage, however unselfconsciously, in pedagogic dynamics that may have a direct bearing on the manner in which people engage with climate change, and of course, all manner of other crises or issues. While it might be argued that ‘it has always been thus’, it seems to me that climate change now poses a challenge which cannot be approached from a relativist and individualist perspective, i.e. each person to their own. The perspective of the destruction of everyday life as we know it surely must force the most radical reappraisal of all of one’s beliefs—not least, those involving the own codes of professional practice.
To be sure, I hope to have explained why, even if one does believe in such a perspective (each person to their own), it is a perspective which producers in successful media institutions cannot actually practice, even if they fervently believe it to be true. Put very simply, making a programme with a Chevy Suburban, and broadcasting it around the world, has repercussions that are likely to go far beyond just buying and driving a Suburban for oneself. To suggest that it’s all down to individuals to make what they might of the programme is to deny this difference.
References
1) statistics from www.fueleconomy.gov. Accessed 30 December 2009.
2) This scenario did actually take place in the context of a programme which I have written about elsewhere. See ‘The Media and the Pedagogy of Climate Change: Mass Communication and Environmental Education after the Copenhagen Accord’ at http://cmcee.org/abstracts/media_pedagogy_climate_change.html.