Tim Holmes | ukwatch.net

Reasons To Be Hopeful?

Tim Holmes — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:22:02 +0000

First the bad news. If we had thought the public debate on climate change had been firmly shifted from the basic “experts are divided” stage to the equally illusory but more propitious “it’s happening, but we’re dealing with it” phase, the public may have just given us a reality check. According to an Ipsos MORI poll, referenced in last sunday’s Observer, around 60% of people in Britain still believe that “many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change”, and another 40% “sometimes think climate change might not be as bad as people say”. Only a meagre 22% of the population seem to be aware of the current status of the scientific debate.

There are further serious obstacles when it comes to action to deal with the problem. There is widespread cynicism about green “stealth” taxes and regulation, also discerned in a recent poll for the Independent, which found over 70% of people unwilling to “pay higher taxes in order to fund projects to combat climate change … while two-thirds of Britons think the entire green agenda has been hijacked as a ploy to increase taxes.” Ipsos MORI similarly finds that “only 13%” believe their personal responses “should involve significant and radical lifestyle changes”.

What’s going wrong? I suspect there are a number of things. First has been the disgraceful acquiescence of British broadcast media in the agenda of denial industry, which seems to have had a clear impact on public opinion. British broadcasters, weaned on a notion of “impartiality” that favours powerful interests, just don’t seem able to stop themselves giving time to fraudsters, industry front-men and purveyors of sheer ignorance. We’ve seen it in last year’s “Great Global Warming Swindle” on Channel 4, a documentary surely as baseless and discredited as it’s possible for any broadcast to be, aired in line with specious conceptions of journalistic “balance”, and in spite its creators’ well-earned reputation as fraudsters; in the BBC’s decision to cave on “Planet Relief”, motivated by the very same notion of “impartiality”, the belief of at least one prominent editor that the “causes of climate change” represent “a matter of controversy”, and the helping hand of “Swindle” producer Martin Durkin; in the BBC’s impromptu festival of climate change denial, “Sceptics’ Week”; and in the efforts of blissfully ignorant media clowns like Richard Madeley, Peter Hitchens and (whisper it) Jeremy Clarkson to parade their ignorance as widely as possible – the list goes on, and on, even if among climatologists the debate concluded a decade and a half ago.

Among print media the record of the broadsheets is less than perfect. The Telegraph in particular has played its part in publicising Lord Monckton and Nigel Lawson’s quixotic struggles with reality, and recently gave prominent coverage to the re-vamped, Exxon-sponsored “Oregon petition”, signed by “31,000 scientists”, some of whom, when they exist, apparently even have PhDs. This overall standard of reporting led the late John Theobald and Marianne McKiggan, in a recent study of UK media coverage, to note that the “corporate mass media are, predominantly, still presenting human-induced climate change as a basic argument between “believers” and “unbelievers”. The debate is stalled at square one.”(1)

But one of the most serious culprits is without doubt Britain’s tabloid press. In a series of studies investigating how far the scientific consensus on climate change is reflected in US and UK media, Max Boykoff of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute found that, between 2003 and 2006, there was a largely insignificant divergence from the scientific consensus in British broadsheets, while coverage also improved over time.(2) Among tabloids, on the other hand, Boykoff and Maria Mansfield found that “UK tabloid coverage significantly diverged throughout the study period from the scientific consensus that humans contribute to climate change”, failing to improve in line with the broadsheets. The Daily Mail had a particularly bad record – partly a result, Boykoff and Mansfield suggest, of “the politically conservative stance of the newspaper, where economic status quo and non-regulatory preferences routinely permeate the editorial pages”; as another study of UK broadsheets found, such “similar ideological constellations indeed shaped media representations of climate science and policy issues”. If such “ideological constellations” do play a key role, it is surely significant that the polls bear the clear mark of the “common-sense” economic libertarianism that characterises so much of the discourse of the tabloid and right-wing press.

The “smoking gun” here, however, is surely that socio-economic patterns linked to patterns of newspaper readership tally exactly with those noted in the UK tabloids study. According to Ipsos MORI,

“Those in social class AB, in affluent households, and also those with a university educated/professional qualification background all tend to be more concerned about climate change, back more government intervention and acknowledge a greater need for individual responsibility.

“Newspaper readership is also strongly implicated, with broadsheet readers – particularly those who read The Guardian, The Independent and The Times [the same three UK dailies examined in the broadsheets study] – significantly more likely to cite the environment as a key issue facing the country compared to those who read the mid market and tabloid press.”

Also precisely in line with Boykoff and Mansfield’s predictions is the apparent impact of the tabloids’ misleading coverage on public support for policies to deal with the problem. “Divergent UK tabloid newspaper coverage of anthropogenic climate change found in this study”, the authors note, “may diminish public support for concrete greenhouse gas mitigation programs when the time for behavioral change comes. … Specifically, as ongoing adherence to the journalistic norm of balanced reporting has contributed to a skewed public understanding of human contributions to climate change, it may continue to significantly contribute—along with other factors—to eventual public resistance to climate mitigation and adaptation plans in the UK.” Every word of this prediction seems to be coming true.

But there is another major culprit we ought to mention, and that is the government. The extraordinary blatancy with which it has continued to plough ahead with policies entirely at odds with its public rhetoric on climate change will undoubtedly, and not unreasonably, have bred cynicism among the public. But it is through the prism of popular economic libertarianism that this cynicism is likely to be expressed. Indeed this conclusion is echoed by Mike Childs of Friends of the Earth, cited in the Independent. “People do get cynical”, he suggests, “unless they see benefits. The Government is playing a dangerous game. They are using climate change to identify potential new taxes and revenues but the public aren’t seeing anything in return.” Ipsos MORI’s Phil Downing makes a similar observation: while green taxes are “backed by the public in principle”, people are “asking the question: where is the money going?” In the context of a government that is so clearly not serious about dealing with the problem, perhaps a reaction of profound cynicism should not surprise us.

Yet these latest polling results, while on the face of it shocking and demoralising, suggest some clear points of light. Indeed, one continual finding of recent research has been that media reporting on public opinion consistently exaggerates its right-leaning components, both through selective choice of questions (something Anthony Barnett points to over the recent, widely-covered and apparently influential polling on the issue of 42 days’ detention) and selective reporting of results. Since a great deal goes unreported, and what is covered is often hopelessly skewed, we need to exercise a good deal of caution in assessing the implications of such polls.

Poll results published in May, for instance, provide a potentially illuminating contrast with the most recent results. According to this poll, “a majority of voters believe local councils should force their residents to take action on climate change”; “56% of respondents thought that councils should force people to take action on climate change while 33% did not. 64% of respondents also felt that local authorities should introduce financial incentive schemes to encourage people to reduce greenhouse gases, and 53% felt councils should also introduce penalty schemes for residents who do not act”; a “large majority of respondents – 74% – believe climate change is happening and can be attributed directly to greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activity” (my emphasis); and “61% of people would be likely to vote for a candidate” in general elections “that had policies to combat climate change”.

It is also worth remembering that a poll taken a year ago by Ipsos MORI found similar results to those of its most recent survey on the status of the scientific debate, also finding 70% support for government taking a lead on the issue, “even if it means using the law to change people’s behaviour”, and 78% “willing to do more and go further”. Since then, poll results from last September found 78% of people in Britain believing “human activity IS a significant cause” of climate change, and 70% that it is “necessary to take major steps very soon” to deal with it”; a poll in November found 81% “ready to make significant changes to the way I live to help prevent global warming or climate change”, and even 76% in favour of higher energy taxes (including 22% conditional on revenues being used to fund clean or efficient energy sources). One obvious conclusion seems to be that, when asked whether climate change is happening, people in the UK overwhelmingly reply that it is, and clearly favour government-led action to deal with it. When asked about the opinions of climate scientists, on the other hand – perhaps influenced by the media-endorsed framing of duelling scientific “experts” the question evokes – they are far more likely to convey a picture of division, uncertainty and ongoing debate.

It’s also worth noting just how far reporting of the most recent poll, troubling as it is, has taken one particular interpretation and portrayed it simply as fact. The precise scope of “many scientific experts” leaves significant room for ambiguity over their number, and their significance in the (perceived) debate; reporting in the Observer, therefore, that the “majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans” remains unproven by this poll, and as we have seen, is actually contradicted by other recent polls in which the question is posed directly and unambiguously. Similarly, the poll simply does not demonstrate, as the Observer suggests, that “many” people “believe scientists are exaggerating the problem” – in fact the question is not even posed. The question that is posed – “I sometimes think climate change might not be as bad as people say” – refers only to “people”, not to scientists. To put this in perspective, similar sentiments have in fact been expressed by members of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, leading Oxford climate scientist Myles Allen and NASA’s Gavin Schmidt, who can hardly be accused of not taking the problem seriously.

Even in the most recent Ipsos MORI poll, indeed, 77% of people “still professed to be concerned about climate change”, and 68% “want the government to do more” about it (suggesting that its list of questions on specifically individual responsibility may be a red herring). Similarly, a robust majority of 59% want more investment in renewables, “even if it increases the price of energy bills”. This finding has been replicated again and again in polls of the British public. One Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology research paper published last October, reviewing 23 recent polls and studies on public attitudes and energy policy, found “a high level of awareness of the connection between fossil fuel sources of energy and environmental problems such as climate change”; “very low levels of public support for the use of fossil fuels”; “high levels of concern about the possibility of using up finite resources”; and that “[s]ecurity of supply is a key issue and of growing concern.” Moreover, “all the reviewed polls and studies showed that renewable energy was the public’s preferred energy source”; people “were aware of the potential environmental benefits of renewable energy and recognised it as being important for climate change mitigation”; and “[t]ypically around three quarters of respondents expressed a preference for renewables over nuclear energy”.

Unfortunately if unsurprisingly, after a recent high point last year following the release of the Stern and IPCC reports, “the environment” has now been displaced by “the economy” as a more important issue in the public mind. Clearly this is not encouraging, but nor is it necessarily quite as bad as it looks. In a YouGov poll in May, a majority of 53% blamed “[i]nternational conditions, such as the credit crunch and rising oil and world food prices” for “Britain’s current economic difficulties”. On oil specifically, a WPO poll in April found 85% of people foreseeing a higher oil price in the next ten years (including 58% who see it getting “much higher”), and the same percentage believe that “[o]il is running out and it is necessary to make a major effort to replace oil as a primary source of energy”.

Overall, then, the public are concerned about the economy, which they connect at least partly to the price of oil; there is widespread understanding that the oil price is likely to keep climbing; public support for renewable sources of energy is strong and consistent, as is opposition to fossil fuels; there is a very strong willingness to replace our dependence on oil – linked to issues of depletion, sustainability, security of supply, and the environment; and the public consistently want the government to take a lead and do more on climate change. It is not too difficult to conceive of ways in which these widely-held attitudes can be translated into gains for climate campaigners. If the economy is foremost in the public mind, the issue of its precarious foundation on fossil fuels may be the key to reconnecting public concern with sustainability and environmental issues, especially if we are able to point to clear, positive alternatives. But media campaigners may also have an important task ahead, which is to start taking the tabloid press (along with papers like the Telegraph) a lot more seriously. Good use of the Press Complaints Commission in particular, as Climate Campers demonstrated in the case of the Evening Standard, can be very effective in exposing misleading and inaccurate reportage. Nonetheless, time is short, and serious obstacles remain to be overcome.

References:

1. John Theobald and Marianne McKiggan, “The Mass Media, Climate Change, and How Things Might Be”, in David Cromwell and Mark Levene (eds), Surviving Climate Change: The Struggle to Avert Global Catastrophe, London: Pluto, 2007, pp. 158-175.

2. It is worth noting this study’s slant towards the “liberal” end of the mainstream spectrum, however – four of its six sample papers (The Guardian, Observer, Independent, Independent on Sunday, Times and Sunday Times) are “liberal” papers, and it significantly excludes the Telegraph, Britain’s highest-selling broadsheet.

Burning Ambitions

Tim Holmes — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 04:07:16 +0000

If you’ve been following the news over the weekend, you’ll probably have noticed Blair’s back, and he brings glad tidings to the world of men. The disgraced ex-premier and war criminal flew to Japan on Friday to discuss his plans for a global climate deal, establishing binding targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The Guardian, which happily landed an interview with the guy, told us of Blair’s “ambitious plan for a global climate change deal” which has “been in gestation ever since he left office”. The word “ambitious”, indeed, appears three times in this interview (only once attributed to Blair – evidently the paper was kind enough to echo and amplify his thoughts).

Much of the mainstream press also echoed the adulation of Blair’s “ambitious” new plans. “My God,” writes the Guardian’s Martin Kettle, “now even Tony Blair has got religion on climate change.” John Rentoul in the Independent could barely restrain his lofty estimation of the man’s vision – Blair’s is an “absurd ambition”, he writes – but one which is nonetheless “admirable, however far it falls short”. The same message – combining a lofty appraisal of Blair’s goals with cynicism about the possibility of achieving them – was peddled by the Times. In their headline’s words: “After world peace, Tony Blair’s next mission is to save the planet”. Even Mark Lynas, of all people, gets in on the act – granted, in a more measured and qualified way – writing that Blair may be a “champion” for climate change campaigners; a “man whose time has come”.

So what does his plan actually amount to? According to the BBC, Blair is trying “to guide attempts to secure a deal involving China and the US to slash emissions by 50% by 2050”. Why 50%? In Blair’s words: “There is no point producing something that is not politically doable.”

On the other hand, is there any point producing a target that won’t keep us in the climatic safe zone, avoiding the “tipping points” we need to avoid to prevent runaway climate change? Certainly, a binding agreement would be better than the nothing we have at the moment; and as Blair suggests, this initiative may set the stage for future agreements. Otherwise, amidst the talk of Blair’s “ambitious” plans, the question is barely raised.

It’s time we started raising it rather more forcefully. According to what now constitute the more conservative estimates, “The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures … would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.” In February, research by Damon Matthews, from Concordia University in Canada, and Ken Caldeira, from the Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford, USA, published in Geophysical Research Letters, found that “[g]reenhouse gas emissions will have to be eliminated completely to stabilise the Earth’s climate and prevent temperatures from rising.” As New Scientist reported,

“Roger Pielke, a climate policy expert at the University of Colorado in Boulder, agrees with the findings. “This research makes the case that simply stabilising concentrations is insufficient to stabilise temperatures. Their argument, if widely accepted, raises the bar on what it means to mitigate climate change,” he says.

“Matthews and Caldeira warn that current emissions targets for 2050 are insufficient to avoid substantial future warming. Instead they believe that we need to eliminate emissions, or find a way of actively removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.”

This research echoed the findings of a study published last October by Andrew Weaver and colleagues at the University of Victoria in Canada, that “[o]nly the total elimination of industrial emissions [by 2050] will succeed in limiting climate change to a 2°C rise in temperatures”. As Weaver adds, “There is a disconnect between the European Union arguing for a 2°C threshold and calling for 50% cuts at 2050 – you can’t have it both ways”. And he’s not alone.

“Tim Lenton, a climatologist at the University of East Anglia in the UK, agrees that even the most ambitious climate change policies so far proposed by governments may not go far enough. “It is overly simplistic [to] assume we can take emissions down to 50% at 2050 and just hold them there. We already know that that’s not going to work,” he says.

“Even with emissions halved, Lenton says carbon dioxide will continue building up in the atmosphere and temperatures will continue to rise. For temperature change to stabilise, he says industrial carbon emissions must not exceed what can be absorbed by Earth’s vegetation, soil and oceans.

“At the moment, about half of industrial emissions are absorbed by ocean and land carbon “sinks”. But simply cutting emissions by half will not solve the problem, Lenton says, because these sinks also grow and shrink as CO2 emissions change.

“People are easily misled into thinking that 50% by 2050 is all we have to do when in fact have to continue reducing emissions afterwards, all the way down to zero,” Lenton says.”

Unfortunately, this itself may not be enough. As the US’s leading climate scientist James Hansen put it last May, “what’s now become clear is that maybe 1 degree Celsius is dangerous, because already we’re seeing on West Antarctica a net loss of ice and the ocean is warming and it is beginning to melt the ice shelves.” In June, Hansen, along with five other scientists “from some of the leading scientific institutions in the United States”, published a report concluding that the dangerous level of man-made greenhouse gases “is much lower than has commonly been assumed. If we have not already passed the dangerous level, the energy infrastructure in place ensures that we will pass it within several decades”. A “feasible strategy for planetary rescue” therefore “almost surely requires a means of extracting [greenhouse gases] from the air.”

Since this report was published, the data from the melting of arctic sea ice has worsened considerably. As Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the US government’s snow and ice data center in Colorado, put it in December, “The Arctic is screaming”. According to Dr. Olav Orheim, head of the Norwegian International Polar Year Secretariat, it is “highly possible” that “the ice cap in the Arctic will all melt away” this year. As Hansen told one interviewer in February,

“we will have to restore the point of energy balance because as it stands now we will lose the arctic sea ice without any more greenhouse gases, because there is additional warming that’s in the pipeline, because the planet is out of energy balance, just because of the inertia of the system.

“That means we would have to reduce the amount of CO2 at least to the 350ppm level, and we are already at 385. So, we’ve actually got to go backwards …

“We can see that 385ppm is really going to produce a significantly different planet. And also just looking at what’s now happening, not only in the Arctic, and the fact that the ice sheets are not stable with the current CO2 amount, and the fact that the sub-tropical regions have expanded noticeably by a few hundred kilometres, that’s enough to effect the southwest US, the Mediterranean, and Australia I should point out.

“So there’s a lot of things, also coral reefs are another example. If we want to reduce the stress on coral reefs, we have to both reduce CO2 and the warming of the ocean temperatures. So there are a number of things like that which make it clear that we’ve already passed the target level that we should be aiming for.”

Stripping carbon from the atmosphere is possible, Hansen notes, principally through “improved agricultural and forestry practices” (which, he adds, we’re currently undermining). How long we have in terms of time is something we simply don’t know:

“you know we’re pushing the atmospheric composition beyond the level which will give us a stable climate, so we’re overshooting the acceptable level. And we don’t know how long we can stay in a state where we’ve overshot that level. Obviously, if you overshoot for one day, that’s not going to cause a problem. It’s a question of how many years can you leave it at a level which is going to cause long term unacceptable impacts, like instability of the ice sheets. …

“That’s the key question, but it’s a very hard one because the systems in question are non-linear. Inherently it’s very difficult to predict a point of collapse. Whether you’re talking about an ice sheet collapsing or whether you’re talking about an ecosystem collapsing because as some species go extinct, that effects others because they’re all connected. So it’s just inherently a very difficult non-linear problem, and the models are just not up-to snuff as far as giving us the numbers for that. We can’t simulate the responses that are occurring right now in Greenland and West Antarctica.”

As John Houghton, formerly both Co-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Director General of the UK Metrological Office, adds, “[t]he urgency of action on climate change is being recognised at an ever increasing rate, with new evidence constantly coming to light.”

We simply have no time to lose. And what is abundantly clear is that none of this can happen at all unless we phase out coal power. The British government, as should also be abundantly clear by now, is going in the opposite direction – both stepping up the extraction of coal from the ground, and building a new generation of coal-fired power plants. If we want to prevent this from happening, as both Hansen and Al Gore have suggested, direct action has to be a serious part of our efforts (and, as we now know, this year’s climate camp is set to be targeting the site of the proposed new coal-fired station at Kingsnorth in Kent). On its own, one big climate camp a year is unlikely to take us where we need to go. But, if part of a concerted, growing campaign, direct action works; it has worked before; and it can work again. Moreover, the necessary target is achievable. As Hansen says:

“I think an initial target of 350 is doable provided we phase out coal, and although that sounds like a real tough job, in fact it’s doable and if we don’t do it there is no question, if you look at the times in the earth’s history when there was that much CO2 in the atmosphere it was a completely different planet. We have to do it and it is doable … if we compare it to how much effort we put into World War II, it’s a doable job and the incentives are just as great as they were then.”

The original purpose of this post was to draw attention to the looming chasm between what the mainstream media lauds as “ambitious” and what the science is telling us are our minimum necessary targets. What I’m particularly struck by, though, is the extraordinary sense of hope and possibility with which Hansen himself seems to be able to tell us the apparently unthinkable. The mainstream media’s version forms an extraordinary contrast: a totally inadequate target not only rendered “ambitious”, but in some cases so ambitious that it’s barely worth imagining we can possibly achieve it. We are presented with two highly divergent visions of the future. Only one of them can possibly bear thinking about.

Fourth Estate or Manufacturers of Consent?

eddie — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:48:06 +0000

Tim Holmes asks if today’s media fulfil their role as a ‘fourth estate’ or whether they have instead become a tool for the ‘manufacture of consent’

The conception of the media as “fourth estate of the realm” is grounded in liberal democratic theories of its role in a functioning democratic polity. Much of the historical mythology such theories carry with them has been convincingly challenged (see, for instance, Curran 2002), but in general their normative content remains useful in evaluating media systems’ performance. Curran provides a concise formulation of the concept in Power Without Responsibility:

“As the “fourth estate”, the press scrutinizes the actions of the executive, and relays public opinion to lawmakers. The press also keeps people informed about what is happening in the world, and provides a forum of public debate. It thus lubricates the working of democracy by facilitating the formation of public opinion.” (Curran and Seaton 2003: 246)

Or, more concisely: “informing the public; scrutinizing government; staging a public debate; and expressing public opinion” (ibid). To these, Curran suggests, should be added a recognition of specifically economic power, so that, in terms of their normative role, “the media are conceived as being a check on both public and private authority.” (2002: 219)

In contrast to this normative ideal, the descriptive framework developed by Herman and Chomsky, principally in Manufacturing Consent (1994), outlines a “propaganda model” of the mass media (specifically the contemporary US media) in a “free market” system. This media’s selective activity is a direct consequence of several core institutional constraints, or “filters”: ownership (by large-scale media oligopolies, generally incorporated into larger corporate entities); funding (through the sale of lucrative audiences to advertisers); reliance on sources (reflecting both the resource constraints of the media themselves, and the relative prominence of resource-rich sources, typically employing techniques derived from the P.R. industry); “flak” (high-profile criticism, complaint and retaliation); and ideology (specifically, in Manufacturing Consent, “anti-communism” – though with the demise of the Soviet Union various more appropriate successors have been identified, among them a quasi-religious “faith in the market” [Herman 1999:269] and the “War on Terror” [Mullen 2006]).

Alex Doherty (2004) has recently proposed an extension of the model to the specific institutional structure of the BBC. In terms of ownership, Doherty notes the BBC’s status as a state-owned broadcaster, with a Government-appointed Board of Governors “drawn from a narrow elite sector of society with intimate links to government and big business”; in terms of funding, the corporation’s “licence fee renewal is at the government’s own discretion”, a significant lever of influence; while the last three filters affect the BBC in a similar fashion to the corporate media.

The overall outcome of this model, Herman and Chomsky claim, is the overwhelming predominance of elite framings in the mainstream media, with dissent marginalised. Where elite opinion is divided, the media will tend to reflect such divisions, but within strict limits. Media staff are selected for conformity to, and will in general tend to internalise, the norms and values of the institutions within which they work. Those that do not, the model predicts, will tend to find themselves marginalised or excluded.

A good deal turns on which of these models more closely conforms to reality. Given the crucial role accorded the media in facilitating the functioning of democracy in liberal democratic thought, the extent to which they follow either the predictions of the propaganda model or the requirements of the “fourth estate” role will inevitably raise fundamental questions about the degree to which a democracy is meaningfully functional.

From “control” to “chaos”?

A considerably more optimistic descriptive framework has recently been expounded by Brian McNair in Cultural Chaos (2006a). Following the model of chaos theory in the natural sciences, McNair proposes an analogous paradigm for understanding contemporary media systems, emphasising their largely unpredictable complexity. While the desire for control over the media on the part of elites remains, McNair argues, their ability to impose it has been undermined by such factors as decreasing entry costs, the proliferation of different outlets, and the rise of new media – in particular the internet, which for McNair represents a genuinely Habermasian “public sphere”. With the end of the Cold War, he argues further, an ideological transformation has overcome the Western media: the frame of the “national security state”, and its threatening enemy in the form of the Soviet Union, have fallen by the wayside. With this change, and with deference to authority generally declining, a new objectivity and pluralism have entered journalistic discourse. The main danger, according to McNair, is in fact an overly critical, “hyper-democratic” media promoting “corrosive cynicism” and frequently exaggerated hype; though, he suggests, this may be a necessary evil in democratic societies.

An examination of the contemporary media, however, reveals some rather significant problems with this optimistic assessment. In fact, as I will argue, while certain changes and developments are worth taking into account, McNair’s optimism is often naïve and largely unfounded, the contemporary media tending not to refute but to vindicate Herman and Chomsky’s thesis.

East Timor redux

One case study that may provide an illuminating point of entry into these questions is the death of former US President Gerald Ford on 26 December 2006, which, as with those of most public figures, provoked a good deal of commentary, reminiscence and reflection on his life and record in office, in obituaries, columns and editorials. One significant episode of his premiership notable by its absence, however, was Ford’s authorisation of Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor. This invasion and subsequent occupation, supported by the United States and Britain, became what many consider a genocide, with around one-third of the Timorese population wiped out (Goodman, Simpson and Nairn 2006).

In the week after Ford’s death, the topic featured in one article in the British media (Mulchrone and Hitchens 2006), and one in the US (Regan 2006). The leader-writers of the Guardian, generally considered the left extreme of the British press, published an editorial titled “In praise of… President Ford”, acording to which “our era is right to see him more generously” than his own. “America,” indeed, “would be truly fortunate if it can find itself another Jerry Ford.” (Guardian Editors 2006) According to an obituary in the same paper (Jackson 2006), apart from “the Nixon pardon, and a bungled assassination attempt”, there was “little to remember about Ford’s presidency.”

If mainstream journalism does indeed display the kind of “hyper-adversarialism” McNair claims, it is difficult to see how such a striking omission could possibly occur. There can surely be fewer more urgent concerns for a democratic polity than its government’s history of complicity in genocidal violence: here, however, that history was almost entirely elided. Overwhelmingly, in the British and American press, the East Timorese fell into the category of “unworthy victims”, as predicted and set out by the propaganda model. As recent research has suggested (Philo and Berry 2004; Lewis 2001), such “black holes of history” are often reflected in public knowledge, and can have serious implications for people’s understanding of the past.

Institutions and influences

While the example of Gerald Ford’s death, then, may illustrate most effectively the operation of ideology within the mainstream press, the other institutional factors described in Manufacturing Consent also persist. Restrictive patterns of ownership have been consolidated over the last few decades, with most media outlets now in the hands of a few conglomerates (McChesney 2002; Bagdikian 2004; Meehan 2005). While direct intervention by owners is not the norm, they are indirectly able to exert a powerful influence by appointing like-minded editors who foster and oversee a generally amenable journalistic culture (Curran and Seaton 2003; Monbiot 2004).

The importance of advertising revenue to the commercial media – what Herman and Chomsky term “the advertising license to do business” – has not lessened since the days of Britain’s Daily Herald, whose collapse despite popularity and increasing sales can be attributed largely to a haemorrhage of advertising revenue (Curran 2002; Curran and Seaton 2003; Richards 1997). The proliferation of different outlets has likely increased advertisers’ power relative to the media, by intensifying competition for revenue. Media personnel, it seems, remain keenly aware of these pressures. As Nick Taylor, editor of the Guardian’s “Spark” magazine, put it in one particularly candid email to the organisation Media Lens:

“Ever worked on a magazine launch? The first and only real questions are: who will advertise with in product [sic.] / Will it be read by people whom advertisers want to reach?

“Readers/viewers/listeners are the most important thing to any publisher or broadcaster. But, from an economic point of view, primarily because high numbers of readers means high ad revenue. And media survive only through ads. I and all writers/editors/ broadcasters would love it to be different but there is no option – the basic cost of producing the Guardian every day is (of course) more than the cover price. No matter how many readers bought it, we would lose money, in fact an increasing amount of money, without ad revenue – unless we put the cover price up to what it really costs us to make the paper, which is somewhere north of £5 a copy.” (Media Lens 2004)

Selling “people whom advertisers want to reach” to those advertisers is a crucial factor in constricting the ideological range of the mainstream press, as the history of the Daily Herald attests. Advertisers not only require quantity from audiences, but also, crucially, quality. As Eileen R. Meehan writes of US television broadcasting:

“Advertisers’ demand for such high-quality consumers means that highly rated programs that attract a broad range of consumers … may earn lower revenues or be cancelled while lower-rated programs that deliver the most valued demographic earn higher revenues and get renewed.” (2005:23)

Guardian writer Nick Davies attests to the stark influence these advertising-derived demographic pressures exert on media workers. “Marketing experts,” he writes, have even “rewritten news values so that it is now commonplace for news editors to demand a particular story in order to appeal to some new target group in the market place.” (cited Curtis 2003:376)

While this appears to be the main impact of the media’s reliance on advertising revenue, it cannot – as commentators such as Peter Wilby (2007a) have suggested – be considered its only influence. Advertisers naturally “require an ad-friendly environment for their commercials” in Meehan’s words (ibid:3), and direct prescriptions on content are far from unknown. As Noreena Hertz notes, for instance, “Procter & Gamble explicitly prohibits programming around its commercials “which could in any way further the concept of business as cold or ruthless”.” (2002:7) Similarly, a memo from Coca-Cola’s advertising department issues pointed instructions to magazines, requiring that:

“all insertions are placed adjacent to editoral that is consistent with each brand’s marketing strategy… We consider the following subjects to be inappropriate: hard news, sex, diet, political issues, environmental issues… If an appropriate positioning option is not available, we reserve the right to omit our ad from that issue.” (cited Steven 2003:110-1)

The power of sources has become an increasingly salient issue in the study of political “spin”. The proliferation of news outlets, and in particular the growth in 24-hour rolling news, have undoubtedly increased the pressures on news organisations in terms of time, money, human resources and demand for content; at the same time, the P.R. industry has undergone a huge expansion, and powerful, resource-rich groups are increasingly well-placed to exploit a generally collusive relationship of mutual dependency (Davis 2003; Franklin 2003). The pressures this relationship can exert on journalists are often very powerful. The New Statesman’s John Kampfner, for instance, has reportedly declared that “[n]obody will bloody speak to me because of the mad editorial line this magazine takes! How can I get scoops from government ministers when we accuse them of being war criminals and Nazis every week?” The magazine’s “far left” stance, according to Kampfner, made his job “impossible” (Private Eye 2004).

Management of access and the flow of information, then, are of considerable importance. Nicholas Jones (2007a; 2007b; also cited Holmes 2007b) has attested to New Labour’s promiscuous leaking of confidential material to carefully selected journalists in an effort to win favourable coverage, and the continuing use of the practice under Gordon Brown. Stories such as the Independent on Sunday’s recent front-page exclusive and editorial on the government’s proposal for offshore wind farms, which painted the government favourably the day after a highly critical protest march, may be seen as evidence both that this collusive, mutually beneficial relationship continues, and that powerful sources can often effectively supersede the publicity efforts of more diffuse, resource-poor groups (Holmes, ibid).

In Britain, a major source of journalistic “flak” derives from the harshly punitive nature of British libel laws, with eminent firms such as Carter-Ruck having earned a notorious reputation among journalists. As Geoffrey Bindman points out, “[l]ibel claims are rarely possible except between millionaires, whether individuals or corporations on both sides”;

“[t]hose who lose out are the poor victims who cannot afford to sue or those who are sued and cannot afford to defend themselves – and they are usually the ones most seriously damaged. Legal aid has never been available in libel cases.” (2000:72-3)

Well-organised and -resourced campaigns of flak by particular groups can also be highly effective. The American academics Mearsheimer and Walt, for instance, have recently noted the significant influence of the “Israel Lobby” in the US, which, “[t]o discourage unfavorable reporting on Israel … organizes letter writing campaigns, demonstrations, and boycotts against news outlets whose content it considers anti-Israel.” (2006:21) Philo and Berry (2004) identify similar campaigns of pro-Israel “flak” mobilization in the UK.

Other factors?

It is also worth considering other, more oppositional influences on the mainstream media besides those outlined by Herman and Chomsky (1994). Some of the filters they describe, indeed, can be exploited by relatively disempowered groups in an attempt to gain greater access and influence. The mainstream news media’s increasing reliance on external sources as “information subsidies”, for instance, can sometimes be exploited by relatively resource-poor actors (Davis 2003), as exemplified most prominently by environmental activists and other exponents of unconventional, attention-grabbing forms of protest. This often allows for some influence over the mainstream agenda, although to an extent that should not be exaggerated. Relatively resource-poor, “outsider” groups are generally confined to a “back-gate” position, unlike more powerful, agenda-setting elites (Wolfsfeld 2003; Anderson 2003). Well-resourced groups, particularly large corporations, are also well-placed to adapt their own P.R. strategies in unconventional ways, in order to garner more favourable coverage – often through the use of front groups, third parties, and even “fake citizens” (Stauber and Rampton 2004; Monbiot 2002).

The use of “flak” can similarly be mobilised by some resource-poor campaigners, including readers and viewers, particularly via the internet. Media Lens’s encouragements to readers to contact journalists, for instance, have mobilised email campaigns that, according to the Guardian’s George Monbiot, “have begun to force” media workers “to look over their left shoulders as well as their right” (Media Lens 2007). Journalistic agency is another factor: media workers are sometimes able to offer resistance which can have an impact on coverage (see, for instance: Palast 2003; Curran, ibid:223). Journalists’ power, however, is necessarily circumscribed by the institutions within which they work, which can make life difficult for persistent dissenters, and foster a (generally internalised) culture of compliance with prevailing norms (Curran, ibid:154-5; Curran and Seaton, ibid:84-5).

Best cases

Given these continuing institutional constraints on the mainstream media, to what extent does its ability to conform to the requirements of its “fourth estate” role survive? Recalling the four major functions of the media in this role – informing the public; scrutinizing government (and private power); staging a public debate; and expressing public opinion – allows us to examine and evaluate the media’s performance on each. For the sake of fairness, I have focused on what are generally regarded as exemplary instances of the media living up to its “fourth estate” ideals.

In terms of informing the public, the contemporary “news environment”, with its emphasis on continual updates and “24/7” rolling news, is often portrayed as an invaluable and unprecedented information resource. As McNair (2006b) writes, “[t]he quantity of news and other information available has increased exponentially”, while “the speed of its flow has increased … [a]nd information, like knowledge, is power.” As noted above, however, if anything the greater demand for content, accompanying more intense resource pressures on media institutions, has tended to make outlets more susceptible to manipulation by high-profile, resource-rich groups. In some cases this has led to the inflation of spurious rumour and unsubstantiated official claims (Lewis and Brookes 2004; Thussu 2003), and even to outright fabrication and “fake news” (Barstow and Stein 2005; Huck 2006; Goodman and Farsetta 2006; Goodman et al. 2006). According to Yvonne Ridley, for instance, during the Afghanistan war, “some TV reporters paid Northern Alliance soldiers $5 a round to start firing off as the cameras rolled”, in order to give the (far-from-accurate) impression that journalists were close to the action (Ridley 2003:249). Thus the media in fact seem ever more likely to supply misinformation.

While this view has been challenged by Norris (2000), who regards the contemporary media as contributing to a more informed public, Justin Lewis (2001:xii) provides an essential caveat regarding such information’s “ideological nature”. “Whether we have more or less of it,” Lewis notes, “information is neither neutral nor necessarily benign”. Indeed given Norris’s further conclusion that the “attentive public exposed to the most news consistently displayed the most positive orientation towards the political system, at every level” (ibid:251) – precisely what Lewis reads as the media’s exercise of hegemonic power – we might reasonably infer a more indoctrinated public.

In terms of scrutinizing government, journalists are often portrayed in certain hagiographic accounts as fearless investigators and exposers of official wrongdoing. Many of these have been vastly overstated, however. The iconic investigation into the Watergate affair, for instance, contrary to much popular mythology, was subject to a great deal of “elite guidance”, which largely framed the boundaries of issues and facilitated the release of information (Curran 2002:222).

A more recent example, cited by McNair (2006a), is Seymour Hersh’s revelation of the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Examining mainstream US press coverage, Entman (2006:216) observes that “stories and editorials were sometimes punctuated by framings of the torture policy that challenged the [Bush] administration’s preferred narrative of a few underlings run amuck.” As Herman emphasises (1999:267), the propaganda model predicts that such factors as “disagreements among the elite and the extent to which other groups in society are interested in, informed about, and organized to fight about issues” will result in a “relatively open or closed” media. These punctuations are worth noting, then – though, as Entman also acknowledges, the latter, officially-endorsed framing still predominated. Worth emphasizing in particular, however – a point Entman includes in a footnote – is the force exerted by the verbal framing within which the episode as a whole was (and generally still is) covered: “the naming of the narrative the “prisoner abuse scandal,” with each word functioning to moderate what might otherwise be more transgressive and dissonant. An example of a more threatening alternative label might be “American torture policy.”” (Entman, ibid:224)

McNair (2006a:70) raises a number of other issues relating to the Iraq war: the critical nature of much media coverage, including predictions of a potential “looming quagmire”; and “a prism” through which one commentator claims the European press “highlighted the human costs, difficulties and risks”.

It is odd that McNair sees this evidence as a convincing counter to critics of the media’s pro-war slant. In their summary of the Cardiff study’s findings, for instance (to which McNair refers) Lewis and Brookes (2004:133-4) explicitly acknowledge the framing of TV coverage around the war’s “process and progress”: “how long would it take for US/British forces to win, and at what cost?” The boundaries of debate here, as one recent comparative examination has suggested (Lanine and Media Lens, 2007), are strikingly similar to the Soviet media’s in covering the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. The fundamental questions were not of the motivation or legitimacy of that country’s aggression, but “the merit of the strategies for achieving its goals”. It is worth recalling that the propaganda model does predict criticism and debate, sometimes fierce, but within narrowly-defined boundaries; far from being repudiated here, then, its predictions seem to be confirmed.

To what extent, though, has the Hutton Inquiry facilitated an “ongoing media narrative of lies, deceit and betrayal” in the UK, as McNair suggests (ibid:65)? Again, a relatively narrow framing of the issue seems to predominate, which does not threaten the structuring ideology of Britain’s “basic benevolence” (Curtis 2003:380). Underlying the focus on questions of success and failure in implementing Western foreign policy goals, for example, is an implicit acknowledgement of these goals’ legitimacy. In correspondence with Media Lens in 2005, for instance, the BBC’s director of News, Helen Boaden, wrote in two different emails:

“[BBC defence correspondent] Paul Wood’s analysis of the underlying motivation of the coalition [that British and American forces “came to Iraq in the first place to bring democracy and human rights”] is borne out by many speeches and remarks made by both Mr Bush and Mr Blair.”

“To deal first with your suggestion that it is factually incorrect to say that an aim of the British and American coalition was to bring democracy and human rights, this was indeed one of the stated aims before and at the start of the Iraq war – and I attach a number of quotes at the bottom of this reply.” (Media Lens, 2006a and b)

According to Media Lens, accompanying her email “Boaden supplied no less than 2,700 words filling six pages of A4 paper of quotes from George Bush and Tony Blair to prove her point.” (ibid.) Far from even acknowledging the possibility of “lies, deceit and betrayal” then, Boaden clearly implies that these official claims provide a sufficient evidential basis for “factual” reporting.

Recent exchanges with prominent BBC staff on climate change provide an illuminating point of comparison. Given the scientific consensus on the facts of anthropogenic climate change, growing increasingly robust over a number of years (Oreskes 2004, 2007; NERC 2006; Le Page 2007; Harding 2007), we might expect this to provide a similarly sufficient evidential basis for factual reporting. The BBC’s Newsnight editor Peter Barron, however – having previously stated that “I don’t think it’s right to challenge the assumption that [Bush] wants democracy in Iraq” (Media Lens 2006a) – declared in correspondence that “the issue of impartiality does need to be taken into account in every programme we do”; and that, in this context, the “causes of climate change” constitute “a matter of controversy” (Holmes 2007a).

This apparent inconsistency makes considerably more sense if interpreted as reflecting the influence of powerful political and economic interests. On the issue of climate change, a number of high-profile front groups, funded by the fossil fuel industry in particular, have promulgated a “skeptical” line which the BBC has often given a legitimating platform (Holmes 2006; Monbiot 2006b). Tuchman’s (1972) diagnosis of journalistic “objectivity” as “strategic ritual” would therefore seem to retain its utility here, in describing a means of “balancing out and accommodating the most powerful lobbies and the loudest voices” (Lynas 2007). Far from seriously challenging power, then, the BBC often employs a strident rhetorical appeal to normative “fourth estate” principles in an effort to legitimate coverage favouring powerful interests.

Perhaps the most prominent examples of the news media staging a public debate are such deliberative discussion fora as the BBC’s Question Time. In Cottle’s (2003b:169) assessment, such forms represent “meaningful vehicles for wider deliberative processes”; McNair calls them “a logical and welcome extension of the democratic process in a media age” (2006a:67). Question Time itself, however, manifests clear limitations. Firstly, as Cottle notes, such vehicles are “rarely used”; in his sample, “extended” or “expansive” deliberative forms constitute less than 10% of those broadcast (ibid:162-3). Moreover, the elite predominance in framing the debate is marked. The debating panel tend to be drawn from the three main parties, along with an “expert”, businessman or columnist, and occasional “extra” (Curtis 2003:378-9). The very form of the debate, indeed, may be seen as implicitly favouring a top-down, elitist politics which tends to marginalise both the public and dissenters from the bounds of elite opinion. Aside from the opportunity to ask pre-arranged questions, applaud or jeer, the audience’s role is delimited in quite strict ways. Brief, undeveloped contributions are permitted – far from Cottle’s “sustained engagement” (ibid:168). More fundamentally, the structuring difference between such “opinion-based” forms and “factual”, “hard” news serves to reinforce the latter’s putative “objectivity” – obscuring prevailing patterns of assumption and selection.

A favoured example of the media’s success in representing public opinion is the very plurality of available media outlets, which purportedly reflects the ideological diversity of the public. In Peter Wilby’s (2007b) curt summation: “If you don’t like what’s in the papers, blame the readers, not the journalists.”

This is a misrepresentation in various fundamental ways. As we have noted, in general the market towards which commercial print and broadcast media are oriented is that of advertisers; their “product” lucrative audiences. Thus various rivals in a relatively condensed corporate oligopoly manoeuvre to gain market share (Meehan, ibid:22-3). Traits and divisions within the general population – and even among consumers – do not determine the plurality of media products, then, but rather (at least partly) patterns of variation within those particular, more or less “weighted” demographics “whom advertisers want to reach”. As a result, while news media have often employed a selective appeal to public opinion to justify content (GUMG 1985; Lewis 2001), in the UK evidence suggests that “the press has long been more right-wing than the public it is supposed to represent” (Curran and Seaton 2003:347), with a similar pattern evident in the US (Lewis ibid).

One brief example is provided by a July 2006 poll of British public opinion, which found that:

“More than two-thirds who offered an opinion said America is essentially an imperial power seeking world domination. And 81 per cent of those who took a view said President George W Bush hypocritically championed democracy as a cover for the pursuit of American self-interests.”

A careful examination of editorials in British broadsheets during the same month, using a ProQuest newspaper search (The Guardian, Times, Sunday Times, Independent, Financial Times and Independent on Sunday) found 10 articles alluding to the latter framing. Of these, two tended towards it, while eight tended against – a distribution roughly the inverse of public opinion. Three editorials alluded to the former, “imperial power” frame, tending strongly against it. As suggested above, these frames also appear largely inadmissible for the BBC.

The online revolution?

Like McNair (2006a), some optimists regard the changed environment brought about by the internet in particular as radically different from the preceding one. The internet, McNair argues, massively lowers entry costs: anyone with a computer and internet connection can set up and maintain a blog or website, which can be visited and viewed by anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time. Moreover, bloggers and “citizen journalists” can interact with, and even exert a major influence on, the mainstream media’s content and agenda. Thus the internet and “blogosphere” have become a close approximation to Habermas’s idealised “public sphere”.

The internet has effected various changes – facilitating the organising and mobilising of grassroots movements and campaigns, often via such decentralised outlets as indymedia (Downing 2005; O’Riordan 2005); the formation and dissemination of alternative media; and to a limited extent a greater openness on the part of mainstream outlets, including the ability to “jot in the margins”. McNair’s optimistic rhetoric, however, is grossly overstated. Given that global patterns of material and social inequality vastly restrict access to the requisite technology (Sparks 2005), a key requirement of Habermas’s normative public sphere – that “[a]ccess is guaranteed to all citizens” (Habermas 2001) – can hardly be said of the online environment.

Within those relatively privileged enclaves with such access, moreover, there are considerable efforts to command and direct online attention – “one of the most valuable resources in the new era” (Polat 2005). Those most able tend, unsurprisingly, to be well-resourced and well-established. “Without promotion,” in the words of one internet executive, “you’re just a lemonade stand on the highway” (cited Curran 2002:154). “It is abundantly clear,” writes Ebrahim Ezzy (2006), “that advertisers are seeing a compelling opportunity to leverage the Internet as a powerful medium that drives both branding and sales results”; the Economist (2006) even dubs Google “the world’s most valuable online advertising agency disguised as a web-search engine”. While media and entertainment industries are expected to be the largest online advertising spenders in the next five years, accounting for “more than a quarter of search advertising alone” (Gonsalves 2006), if current patterns of inequality continue, it will be the biggest, wealthiest companies that reap the benefits: in the first half of 2007, for instance, as few as 50 companies accounted for one-third of all ad spending (Peterson 2007). Moreover, online advertisers increasingly rely on interactive marketing (Economist, ibid.), whose relative expense “raises the barriers to market entry” (Freedman 2006:279; Cohen 2004).

The online “main square” therefore accompanies more marginal “back streets” (Curran and Seaton ibid:270). McNair himself acknowledges the importance for aspiring bloggers of gaining mainstream attention – even, as in his example of Norman Geras, through specific ideological positionings – suggesting the “resilience” both of existing mainstream media (Freedman 2006), and of that media’s ideological restrictions. Already, indeed, there is some evidence that the left in particular have been marginalised (Jones 2007c).

Accounts such as McNair’s, then, which stress the transformed character of the contemporary media environment, tend to evince a misguided technological determinism, failing to take into account the surrounding political, social and economic contexts in which such technologies are used. Combined with a failure to convincingly rebut established accounts of mainstream media’s ideological restrictions, McNair’s optimistic description is largely a mirage: a good deal more must change before the contemporary media come close to fulfilling their fourth estate role.

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