Page 184 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

178 R.A. HACKETT AND S. GUNSTER

the Oil Sands, for example, was the fact that ‘the oil industry and envi-
ronmental groups both support a carbon price, but they’ve never come
together on the same stage and said, ‘Prime Minister Harper, this is
something we all support’. And the reason for that is… because they’re
fighting so much [both groups] can never see where they have similar
objectives’. For Beers (2006), this was ‘a huge story. It’s one of the most
censored stories ever. So finally Bloomberg [news service] comes around
and goes, ‘Ah, this can’t be true’; phones up everybody and finds out it is
true, and then they did their own story …. [F]ine-grained and credible
journalists can be seen as honest brokers of that conversation in ways that
activists and highly invested NGOs cannot’.
Honest brokers? Conversation? By contrast, some of our environmental
communicator respondents expressed a more radical understanding of
conflict frames, and by implication, the imperatives of journalism for social
change. Is an emphasis upon conflict inevitably corrosive for efficacy,
agency and hope? While all of our participants were critical of the pre-
dictable and formulaic patterns of conflict which dominate conventional
news, some argued that conflict narratives are an inescapable and, in fact,
essential part of good climate change communication. And rather than
distracting audiences from engaging with solutions, conflict stories which
intensify polarization, cultivate and focus outrage and celebrate struggle
can facilitate the transition from awareness and concern to political
engagement and activism (Gunster 2017b).
Biggar explained that there are two kinds of archetypal narratives which
have taken shape around climate politics. The first emphasizes the failure of
politicians and traditional institutions to address climate change, represents
stakeholders (industry, government, environmental groups, First Nations,
etc.) as gridlocked, and positions the public as disgusted but helpless
bystanders to dysfunctional processes. ‘That is a very demotivating, dis-
empowering story that leads to cynicism.’ And it is the story of climate
politics which tends to drive conventional news agendas (Gunster 2011).
However, he noted, ‘there is another story in which institutional leaders are
somewhat secondary, and what is actually primary is a fight between global
fossil-fuel companies and place-based, but global civil society’. This second
story is not only a more accurate representation of the current state of
climate politics,

…it is also much more empowering, because in the second story what you
talk about…is victories and defeats, but what you are highlighting is normal