Power games: environmental protest, news media and the internet

Abstract

It's really just about giving the media access to the story ultimately.… New media is increasingly important, but the mainstream media is still very much the main game of the environmental campaigns. (Dan Cass, Communications Team Leader, Greenpeace Australia Pacific) That's where the website is terrific. We all do it; just copy and paste whatever you want off there. It is heaven sent for the media. But if the exercise for the green groups is to win converts, they still have to do the hard work and get journalists to take pictures and to tell the story. They can't rely on the web. (Bruce Montgomery, former journalist, The Australian newspaper) 1Print and electronic news media have played a central role in environmental politics for 30 years: negotiating access, shaping meanings, circulating symbols. Environmentalists have responded with strategies and tactics created for and communicated through the news media. Protest action is one such strategy that has become 'reflexively conditioned' to an unprecedented level in its pursuit of media attention (Cottle, 2008: 853). It is for this reason that the internet and the worldwide web have been a tantalising source of hope for activists over the past decade, offering the potential for independent information distribution devoid of the mediating effect of news journalists and the established news media industries. This article investigates and analyses how the recursive relationship between online digital 'new media' and print and electronic news media -or 'old media ' -has unfolded (Jenkins, 2006), which is an important task if the precise dimensions of the power struggle occurring between environmental activists and news media sources are to be understood.

Unravelling the Threads: Discourses of Sustainability and Consumption in an Online Forum

“…al., 2004). Particular attention has been paid to the ways in which those involved in environmental social movements use (both offline and online) media to frame their understandings and practices for publics (Anderson, 1997;Hansen, 1993;Hutchins & Lester, 2006;Kahn & Kellner, 2005;Lester & Hutchins, 2009). While there have been a number of studies on the intersections of the internet and environmental social movements, few have addressed the tensions and paradoxes of "sustainability" as a broadly deployed discourse with respect to consumption more generally, nor how the meanings of such a fraught discourse is constructed via forms of new media.…”

The Myth of the Angry Voters: Parliamentary Election in Slovak Republic

“…In the other words, new forms of media are able to offer the tools to attract mainstream media attention (Lester and Hutchins, 2009). Source: authors own media monitoring…”

Disability activism in the new media ecology: campaigning strategies in the digital era

“…Indeed, as Chadwick (2011) argued, the increasing interconnectedness between 'emergent' and 'established' forms of media are affording alternative voices new opportunities to contribute to or even drive the 'political information cycle.' Yet, journalists continue to operate according to standards that cast some degree of suspicion over the legitimacy and credibility of online sources (Jha, 2008), and more often than not tend to disregard or report negatively on protest groups (Lester and Hutchins, 2009). This poses a real threat to the ability of groups such as DPAC to have a concrete impact on policy decisions.…”