Page 218 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

214 G. MURDOCK

The fossil fuel industries have been able to rely on sympathetic press
proprietors to support their interests for over a century. Added to which, as
David McKnight and Mitchell Hobbs point out in their chapter detailing
corporate efforts to derail the introduction of carbon trading schemes in
Australia, ‘dark money’ supplied by investors in coal and mining has lent
substantial financial support to a raft of think tanks and foundations pub-
lishing highly partial research and commentary masquerading as disinter-
ested information. Against this, investigative journalism and specialist
environmental and science reporting by public service broadcasters and
broadsheet newspapers has attempted to expose false claims and provide
independent assessments of the weight of available evidence. This fragile,
and always unequal ecology, has been interrupted by the rise of social
media, with far reaching consequences.
Recent years have seen a rapid expansion in the number of websites
promoting climate change denial as part of a wider advocacy of market
fundamentalist strategies aimed at defending business as usual and reduc-
ing state intervention to an absolute minimum. The best known, and
arguably most influential, is Breitbart News, launched in 2007 and man-
aged since 2012 by Steve Bannon, currently the Chief Strategist in the
Trump administration, who is on record as casting the mainstream media
as ‘the opposition party’, a position Trump shares. The reach and influence
of these far-right sites is amplified by their appearance on the news and
information feeds offered by the two most used social media sites, Google
and Facebook, including Google’s quick answers to users’ questions, a
facility which is also installed on the company’s stand-alone domestic
appliance, Google Home (Jeffries 2017). By eliminating the need to
conduct a conventional search for relevant information this service replaces
the option of evaluating competing sources with a single predetermined
answer. The business model employed by both Google and Facebook is
based on harvesting and analysing user data for resale to advertisers
wanting to target their appeals more precisely. This promise has attracted a
rapidly increasing share of advertising spending leaving many conventional
printed newspapers in a precarious financial position. Taken together these
shifts in the communications environment have major consequences for
the mobilization of public support for fundamental measures to address
climate crisis. Three interventions that would make a difference are cur-
rently under active discussion.
Firstly, as key contemporary gatekeepers employing algorithms to direct
customized information and comment to users’ home pages, the leading