Building a Public Controversy

Abstract

This chapter will focus on the interaction between ‘backstage’ policy debates over badger/bTB and the increasingly noisy and visible ‘frontstage’ of the controversy. It will recount the interactions of media, politicians, pressure groups and multiple publics in the wider public sphere, who between them have made badger/bTB into such a hotly contested issue. It will outline some key indicators of how British newspapers have covered badgers, bovine TB and badger/bTB over the past fifty years, and explore the creation of today’s dichotomous framings of the problem—as an agricultural malaise or an environmental risk. Finally, it will investigate the post-2010 shift in the nature of the public controversy from specialist concern to media storm, before discussing the possible drivers of polarisation in today’s environmental and agricultural politics.