Page 182 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

176 R.A. HACKETT AND S. GUNSTER

Common Sense Canadian—argued that an overarching ‘pro-big business’
frame operated as a de facto form of censorship in corporate media: young
journalists quickly learn that ‘you are either going to be censored, or more
likely…self-censored … You are not going to get published as much, [or]
promoted as fast, [or] get paid as much, you are not going to get as many
opportunities, if you do not play the game, if you do not know the script’.
In the rare moments when climate change does break through to the
front pages, our participants suggested that it is invariably filtered through
the prism of conflict. Geoff Dembicki served as the lead sustainability writer
for the independent Vancouver online news outlet thetyee.ca for several
years and he has written extensively about the politics of climate, envi-
ronment and energy over the past decade. Media coverage of climate
change, he suggested, has increased as the confrontational politics associ-
ated with carbon infrastructure projects have intensified, giving news a
familiar template through which to represent the issue.

And while I think it’s good that climate change is getting more attention, and
protests against pieces of infrastructure are getting covered, and those critical
voices are being brought into the mainstream media, the result is that the
entire mainstream narrative around climate change is almost always defined
by conflict. So it’s one group fighting another, one country calling out
another country for not achieving targets, and it results in this very pes-
simistic frame where it’s hard to feel that anything you do can have a real
impact.

For Dembicki, conflict narratives are not only a barrier to agency and
efficacy, they also lock key stakeholders and constituencies into a polarizing
message track which prevents them from communicating with the public
(and each other) in a thoughtful and constructive manner. Instead, their
core communications objective becomes supplying news media with con-
tent that can be easily slotted into conventional journalistic formulas and,
consequently, will generate media attention. While these patterns may
produce good copy, they ultimately marginalize and exclude important
issues from public discourse.
The rhetorical inertia of conflict narratives, compounded by their easy
and productive articulation with dominant routines and patterns of news
production, helps create a self-reinforcing cycle in which this simple form
of storytelling displaces more complicated and less predictable accounts of
climate change. It fortifies the ‘prevailing view in the mainstream media