Page 144 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

134 P. McCURDY

activists” (McCurdy 2013) such as Julian Assange or Edward Snowden. In
a media system such as ours, which manufactures, perpetuates, trades in,
sells and feeds off celebrity, celebrities are given a privileged platform that
guarantees that even their passing comments or off the cuff remarks are
given elevated attention, status and scrutiny.
The use of celebrity to advance both the logic of numbers and logic of
bearing witness is well established in movement repertories of political
contention, becoming a staple in activist campaigning and environmental
and climate movements in particular (see Brockington 2009; Meister
2015). Celebrities can act as both a resource—a form of capital—and a
catalyst in mobilizing political actors as part of the logic of numbers by
encouraging the public to attend a mass demonstration and by endorsing
or promoting the event in advance and/or participating themselves. Their
presence can also amplify the visibility of actions which seek to bear witness
to injustice by heightening the ‘newsworthiness’ of the event and thus the
likelihood of media coverage. At the same time, employing celebrity may
also impede other actions, creating tension within movements over focus,
objectives and power (Gitlin 1980; Meyer and Gamson 1995). However
given the fact that celebrities—rightly or wrongly and for good or for ill—
are afforded political standing in their own right, we need now to recognise
celebrity as an additional and separate logic that may hinder as well as
advance the causes and claims they are enlisted to support. Consequently,
this chapter examines the interplay between the logics of celebrity and
bearing witness through a case study of the mediated battle over Alberta’s
bitumen.
The empirical material referenced and drawn upon here is taken from the
larger Mediatoil research project conducted by the author (see www.me-
1
diatoil.ca). Mediatoil documented the evolution of contention over the
oil/tar sands as captured in stakeholder’s promotional material. Part of the
documentation process involved creating a timeline of events relating to the
bitumen sands. This produced 179 unique entries documenting project and
government announcements, significant meetings and milestones, notable
publications and instances of protest. The analysis presented here focuses on
the 96 entries related to the political contestation of the Alberta’s bitumen
sands between May 2007 and January 2016. While major efforts were made
to document as many relevant bitumen-related events as possible the
Mediatoil timeline may not be exhaustive. It is however, comprehensive
enough to allow us to chart the development of political contention around
the oil/tar sands over the course of almost a decade.