Changing public discourse on the environment: Danish media coverage of the Rio and Johannesburg UN summits

Abstract

Environmental degradation and unsustainable development were addressed on a global scale at the UN summits in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and Johannesburg in 2002. This contribution presents analyses of Danish television coverage of these two summits and related topics, viewing the media stories as exemplary cases of wider public conceptions of the environment. Over a decade rhetoric about the summits and the environment changed, the agenda changed, and key environmental issues were repackaged. These changes are interpreted in relation to ecological modernisation and discussed as a possible development towards post-environmentalism. Already ecological modernisation can be perceived as post-environmentalist, but the suggestion here is the transformation of ecological modernisation as a prominent discursive frame and thus a further shift in eco-political discourse.

Notes

1. The agenda-setting role of general public media has been widely theorised, e.g. by Dearing & Rogers (1996) defining it as a political process ‘in which the mass media play a crucial role in enabling social problems to become acknowledged as public issues’ (p. 22, here quoted from Ørsten et al., 2005), a process that is facilitated by issue entrepreneurs from power institutions as well as public campaigners (on issue entrepreneurs and environmental issues see also Anderson, 1997).

2. Douglas & Wildavsky's analysis does however run counter to theories of ecological modernisation (see next paragraph) since they understand environmental concern as belonging to a sectarian rationality at the borders of society rather than in the centre.

3. See for instance Luhmann (2000), who opens his theory of mass media by noting that: ‘Whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media’ (p. 1).

4. In the relevant weeks, and a few randomly selected additional weeks, shares were on average in 1992 34% for Nyhederne at 19:00 (26–39%) and 21% for TV-Avisen at 19:30 (20–37%). In 2002 average share was 19% for Nyhederne at 19:00 (15–21%) and 16% for TV-Avisen at 21:00 (13–22%), not counting the two weeks there was a strike). Despite the significant drop in shares for both news programmes from 1992 to 2002, they remain the biggest national television news programmes, if not the only ones. DR and TV2 had a combined total share of 80% on average in the selected weeks in 1992 and 68% in 2002 (Gallup TV-Meter online weekly press releases http://tvm.gallup.dk/tvm/pm/, 8 May 2006).

5. There is a point to applying a broad selection of analytic procedures, in order to discern which discourses are at work in the text sample, because even a short format like news stories constructs meaning in many different ways. (1) Systems of knowledge and belief can be ordered in binary oppositions, so identifying such binaries gives an insight into the discourse. What categories are set in opposition to each other, and which qualities are they aligned with, e.g. when the economy is set in opposition to the environment and the first is aligned with sense and the latter with feelings (cf. Harland, 1993)? (2) Much news reporting is organised as narrations in which knowledge and belief are ordered in relation to the course of events and the actors involved. What follows from what? What are the initial state, the moving force and the consequences? To whom and what are the roles of acting subject (hero), pursued object, helper, opponent (villain), etc. ascribed? For example, when ‘sensible priorities in environmental politics’ is the pursued object, Lomborg is the hero, and environmentalists are the opponent (cf. Greimas, 1974). (3) On television much of the meaning is carried by images – by their denotative and connotative content established in connection with spoken words and narrative and rhetoric developments of the story. What is shown, what surplus meanings might the images carry and which meanings are settled in the combination of images, words and sounds (cf. Barthes, 1990)? Particular images can serve as an index of wider phenomena, which means that the image as sign carries traces of what it signifies (cf. Peirce, 1994). A picture of a fuming chimney can for instance be an index of economic activity as well as environmental deterioration; it carries traces of and can signify both.

6. The same Lomborg who became internationally renowned for his disregard of environmentalism in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001) and countless media appearances.

7. A direct translation of the Danish word ‘kratluskere’.

8. In fact there seems to be a disclosure of the summit's simulative character a couple of times in the Johannesburg coverage when it is characterised as airy and pompous (2 and 3 September), but only to carry simulations into a new field when the prime minister's call for concrete action is followed by a report that focuses on the statement he gives while visiting Soweto rather than on the specifics of the concrete project he visits.