Issues, advocacy, and audience engagement

Sustainability, environmental impact, digitalisation, and alternative medicine are familiar labels. However, scientific, political and media commentary have encouraged audiences to see the spheres that these labels refer to as problematic in some way and therefore deserving of intervention. As a consequence, when encountered they are no longer treated as factual – as referring to objective states, consequences, processes, or options. Instead they incite debate, not only because they are associated with a diversity of opinion about what actions should be taken to address their associated problems but also because the calls for action associated with them are often justified by claims of harmful effects on people, social or economic systems, or the environment. Varied interpretations and subsequent reactions to the facts and opinions informing such claims have nurtured a perception that the status quo is not acceptable – that there is a need to seek greater sustainability, reduce environmental impacts, master digitisation and reject alternative medicines. In other words, when we encounter these labels we are encouraged to assume that we are dealing with established social or environmental issues to such an extent that we are primed to accept implied calls for action. There is an abundance of examples of other familiar labels which have, over time, come to define theatres for personal, social or institutional action.

Global warming is one example of a familiar label: an environmental impact defined by a collection of objective facts about rising greenhouse gas levels in the face of longstanding and escalating global dependence on fossil fuels (Al-Ghussain, 2019). The process of nominalisation, the first of four elements required for a topic to be judged as a problem that requires action (Best, 2007) has occurred. For many, perhaps most people, global warming is now a taken-for-granted issue that is sustained by widespread scientific discussion, report writing, government policy development and media attention (e.g., documentaries, expert columns, calls for state and global action).

This activity has contributed to a massive domain expansion, Best’s (2007) second element, which has coupled global warming to the supraordinate issue of sustainability and fostered significant discursive growth. A way of talking about sustainability has emerged, which incorporates notions of unbridled consumption, ‘throw-away society’, environmental degradation, declining biodiversity, ecosystem disruption, recycling, repurposing, renewable, greenwashing, biodegradable, eco-friendly, ‘going green’ and environmental ethics. This discursive expansion has been channelled into focused campaigns for action, Best’s third element, across all levels of society. The result has been a shift from a largely descriptive lexicon to one containing emotive terms like eco-crisis, climate crisis, climate emergency, and environmental collapse. The Editor-In-Chief of the Guardian newspaper, Katharine Viner (Quoted by Carrington, 2019) provides an example of how the media is helping to orchestrate this discursive shift, stating:

We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue. The phrase ‘climate change’, for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.

The Guardian (2016) has taken action, updating the Guardian and Observer Style Guide to include a revision of its advice on the use of ‘climate change’ to read:

[Climate change] is no longer considered to accurately reflect the seriousness of the overall situation; use climate emergency or climate crisis instead to describe the broader impact of climate change. However, use climate breakdown or climate change or global heating when describing it specifically in a scientific or geophysical sense eg ‘Scientists say climate breakdown has led to an increase in the intensity of hurricanes’.

Such media interventions prompt us to question the media as an open discursive platform where fair, accurate and objective accounts are presented. In reality, we know that:

… anytime the biophysical is captured and categorized, it undergoes varying degrees of interpretation, as influenced by power and scale via temporal and spatial contexts. The media play an inherent role in representing certain interpretations of the biosphere (Luedecke & Boykoff, 2017, p. 3).

Employing words that align with a position or label (e.g., framing it as serious or important) (re)confirms the media as a crucial force in the social construction of the reality presented to readers and viewers. The media become, in many cases, willing advocates of campaigns to influence various publics, with their influence crossing into the realm of social activism as they enlist a variety of platforms to increase their audience.

Official voices represent the fourth element that Best proposes is required for a label to emerge as a problem requiring action. We see this occurring when agents like state and federal government ministers or the United Nations move from audience to activists as they engage with issues, investing resources into campaigns for change designed to mitigate or eliminate social and economic threats. These official voices are hard to ignore but, then, so too are less august agents such as trusted and much loved celebrities and media productions such as the long-running New Zealand television show Country Calendar, featured in the first article in this issue. Celebrities and media productions’ ability to foster engagement is linked to the degree to which they are aligned with existing narratives of concern, (in)justice and fear (Best, 2007) and embedded in the prevailing cultural forms (Markham, 2015). Context, in the form of both cultural understandings and institutional structures and their moments in history, clearly matters in the emergence of issues and people’s engagement with them (Gusfield as reviewed in Best, 2017).

The articles in this issue of Communication Research and Practice examine how issues are presented and sustained through media representations that align with contemporary discourses, imagined audiences and digital activism and then draw attention to the centrality of framing. At the same time, the plethora of techniques available to media to present issues and their associated calls for action mean it is hardly surprising that scholars lament the fragmented nature of media literacy. It seems eminently appropriate, then, that the final article in the issue advocates for standardised media literacy strategies that allow issues and their associated calls to action to be evaluated and then presents a new evaluative media literacy tool, Fallasigns, to do just that.

The first article in this issue, ‘Representations of sustainability and environmental welfare in Country Calendar’ by Geoffrey Craig (2020) examines the 2019 episodes of one of New Zealand’s longest running television programmes, the iconic and much loved Country Calendar, for representations of sustainability and environmental welfare. It identifies representations of sustainable development that include sustainable farming practices within prevailing economic and industry orthodoxies through to representations that embrace more comprehensive expressions of sustainability, capturing an ethos that challenges consumer capitalism and embraces instead a sense of living on the land. Its contribution is the way it highlights not only the types of practices that are the expressions of sustainable action but the importance of the social and cultural dimensions of sustainability, such as education programmes, which support the uptake of these sustainable practices.

The second article is set in regional Australia. ‘Framing development: Identifying dominant themes about the “Adani project” in local regional media’ by Rebecca Somerville and Kate Ames (2020) reviews how regional development is framed in a strongly locally-focused regional newspaper reporting on the progress of a proposal by the Adani Group to establish a mine in the Galilee Basin in Central Queensland. Despite being an established mining region facing a downturn, the newspaper did not reinforce the local support for the Adani Project. Instead environmental concerns dominated the newspaper’s coverage and fuelled a climate of blame and calls for political responsibility. In doing so, the paper’s coverage challenged the expectation that regional media coverage is necessarily ‘parochial’. Instead, like Craig (2020), Somerville and Ames’ (2020) article shows how local traditional media can be very contemporary in their approach by aligning with an environmental sustainability discourse.

Next, Monique Lewis (2020), in her article ‘Political citizens, consumers, or passive patients? Imagined audiences in the complementary medicine debate’ presents a content analysis of news stories about the Australian-based lobby group Friends of Science in Medicine (FSM).  This demonstrates that, while stories can imagine the audience as passive patients, active patient-consumers, or citizens engaged in the public sphere, the models of biocommunicability used in these stories mainly present citizens as engaged in the public sphere and decry complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).

In his article, ‘Leadership in digital activism: An example of techno-enthusiasts in Nigeria’, Temple Uwalaka (2020) focuses on the impact of digital activism on leadership in the organisation of social movements, showing that it has more impact on the organisation of social movements than the media platform employed and that technological skills can be effective for arousing a passive generation and prompting them to act. It closes by proposing a typology of leadership for social movement organisation in Nigeria.

Elaine Xu’s (2020) article ‘A generalisable model for frame identification: towards an integrative approach’ continues the focus on framing. Using an inductive approach, she derives a model for identifying frames and determining their characteristics and the communicative structures they employ.

‘The absence of a media literacy toolbox: Working toward an evaluation tool’ by Gabriel Yakub, Simon Knight, Kirsty Kitto, and Peter Fray (2020) discusses the fragmented nature of media literacy and explores its relationship with technology. It advocates for standardised media literacy strategies, particularly those that deal with evaluation, arguing that these can help confront the challenges of the current media landscape. It then presents Fallasigns, a new evaluative media literacy tool designed to foster a strategic approach to the information gained using digital media. This is promoted as a systematic way of evaluating information by anticipating the most likely logical and rhetorical pitfalls in a news story prior to reading it.

I hope that this interesting and cohesive set of articles, which in various ways address issues, advocacy and audience engagement, will capture your attention and give you cause to reflect on how susceptible we are to media sensegiving and the need to ensure that we have a diversified array of literacy media skills to cope. Please also take time to reflect on the Call For Papers (CFP) for a 2021 Communication Research and Practice special issue on health communication entitled ‘Chronic inequities, critical moments, and culturally-safe practices: Health communication for transformation’. This CRP is located at the end of this issue and offers an invitation for authors to grapple with how health communication uses messages, discourses, narratives, and world views related to personal, organisational, and public wellbeing (Littlejohn, Foss, & Oetzel, 2017) to contribute to prevention and intervention strategies aimed at enhancing human wellbeing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).