The Election That Forgot the Environment? Issues, Emos, and the Press in Australia
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HIJXXX10.1177/1940161214552030The International Journal of Press/PoliticsLester et al. 552030research-article2014 Research Article The International Journal of Press/Politics 2015, Vol. 20(1) 3 –25 The Election that Forgot the © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: Environment? Issues, EMOs, sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1940161214552030 and the Press in Australia ijpp.sagepub.com Libby Lester1, Lyn McGaurr1, and Bruce Tranter1 Abstract The 2013 Australian federal election campaign has been described as the campaign that “forgot the environment.” We test this claim by comparing the news representation of the environment and environmental movement organizations (EMOs) in Australian federal elections from 1990 to 2013, and consider how coverage of environmental issues and organizations has changed over time. We also analyze the intensity and range of coverage of EMOs and environmental issues during the 2013 election campaign in relation to behind-the-scenes media practices of EMOs, including the circulation of media releases and other campaign material, and levels of activity on social media and organization Web sites. We find that this activity did not translate into high visibility in news media for EMOs. We offer tentative evidence of a link between the dominance of climate change coverage and the poor visibility of EMOs and other environmental issues. Keywords environmental movement organizations, Australian election campaigns, climate change coverage, mediated visibility, mediated environmental conflict Introduction Every Prime Minister for the last 17 years has made it to the top job with a little bit of environmental promise; a little bit of green flair, a nod to our collective love of our wide brown land. But don’t expect to see any of that in 2013. This will be the election that forgot the environment. (Phillips 2013) 1University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia Corresponding Author: Libby Lester, School of Social Sciences, University of Tasmania, Private Bag 22, Hobart, Tasmania 7001, Australia. Email: [email protected] DownloadedDownloaded from from http://www.elearnica.ir hij.sagepub.com at CHINA MEDICAL COLLEGE LIBRARY on December 28, 2014 4 The International Journal of Press/Politics 20(1) The 2013 Australian federal election was a disappointment for the nation’s environment movement. Following a period of unprecedented political influence during which the Greens held the balance of power in the nation’s Senate and won state Cabinet positions, the party’s primary vote fell in the 2013 federal poll by 3.3 percent nationally. It fell by 8.7 percent in its traditional stronghold, the island state of Tasmania. During the campaign, journalists, broadcasters, and opinion writers suggested that environmental issues other than climate change were largely absent. The sentences quoted above are illustrative of this widespread commen- tary. They come five paragraphs into an article bookended by a lead that situates major political parties as primary definers of what is at issue for Australia and internationally, and a conclusion that dismisses environmental movement organi- zations (EMOs) as impotent. EMOs and their range of concerns are essentially written out of the story. Our research analyzes press coverage of environmental issues during the past nine Australian federal elections (our longitudinal, comparable sample) and material published on EMO Web sites and social media during the 2013 campaign (our in- depth sample of recent media-related activity). We find that environmental issues were most strongly evident during the elections of 1990, 2004, 2007, and 2010. The peak in total articles mentioning environmental issues occurred during the 2010 campaign, driven by references to climate change. This correlates with longitudinal studies of media interest in environmental issues in other countries (Hansen 2010). However, our study also shows that EMO presence in coverage, while never high, declined in 2010. In the latest election in 2013, the environment was less visible, although references to issues associated with climate change ensured it was still more prominent than in elections from 1993 to 2001, and EMO visibility fell even further, this time to the lowest level in our study. Our online monitoring provides evidence of vigorous EMO public relations and campaign activity in some quarters in the last weeks of the 2013 campaign, but this activity did not translate into high visibility in news coverage for EMOs. Overall, our research is interested in the shifting dynamics of movement politics, news media reporting during periods of formal electoral activity, and the advocacy and visibility of a range of issues that have come to be loosely termed as “environ- mental” but often remain framed as political or economic (Waisbord and Peruzzotti 2009). That our research covers the period of “extreme politics” playing out in Australia over the regulation of carbon emissions provides additional analytical value: While prime ministers and other political leaders lost their jobs in part over carbon policies, environmental issues and EMO claims-makers were less visible than ever. As such, our data allow us to offer comparative and contemporary evidence about the capacity of EMOs to gain sustained and effective media access and the conditions under which this access might now be operating, and some tentative con- clusions about the impact of climate change politics and its coverage on the presence in the news of environmental issues and their advocates more broadly. We also sug- gest avenues for further inquiry. Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at CHINA MEDICAL COLLEGE LIBRARY on December 28, 2014 Lester et al. 5 Environment, Media, and Movement The late 1980s were years of rising media interest in environmental issues in many Western countries. In Australia, the election of 1990 is widely regarded as the first national poll in which “the environment” may have been decisive (Bean et al. 1990). This development, as with similar rises in the United Kingdom and the United States, has been associated with preceding growth in press coverage, with some suggesting media played an agenda-setting role (Pakulski and Crook 1998). Others argue that the rise in environmental news in the same period was driven by priorities established in nonmedia arenas: in the United Kingdom by Margaret Thatcher’s appropriation of environmental concern (Hansen 2010, 2011) and in the United States by events such as a severe drought, an address to Congress by climate scientist James Hansen, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill (Boykoff and Boykoff 2007; J. Hall 2001; McComas and Shanahan 1999; Trumbo 1996). In all three countries, these peaks in environmental news were soon followed by significant declines, suggesting the emergence of a rec- ognizable pattern in environmental news media coverage (Hansen 2010; Lester 2010). Although we are wary of “confusing the media-career of a social issue with the socio/political (or public opinion) career of issues” (Hansen 2010: 21, emphasis in original), it is important to acknowledge Anthony Downs’s (1972) theory of issue– attention cycles and its prescience regarding the peaks and troughs in environmental news. Downs described social problems as having fairly predictable careers that begin when claims-makers such as politicians, scientists, or interest groups first identify concerns. Problems then move through defined stages, from widespread public alarm combined with optimism that solutions will be found to a decline in attention as the costs and complexity of addressing the concerns become apparent. Downs considered environmental problems highly susceptible to rises and falls in public attention because the suffering they cause is unequally distributed, powerful sectors of society derive benefit from the activities that create the problems, and the problems themselves are rarely intrinsically exciting. The last of these attributes is especially relevant to the ability of problems to gain access to the news, which Downs regarded as important in building public concern. In discussing the need for problems to be exciting to stand out from the plethora of potential news items considered by journalists for coverage every day, Downs briefly introduced the notion of competition to his otherwise linear approach. This was subse- quently expanded by Hilgartner and Bosk (1988) in their Public Arenas Model. Here, “interactions among problems are central to the process of collective definition” and competition takes place in a variety of arenas, with success not necessarily related to the validity of claims or their urgency (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988: 55). In modern news arenas, for example, a diminishing number of reporters have increasingly limited time for research and writing. Such constraints lead to struggles for problem recognition and more intense competition for control over the way they are framed. Only a small number of potential social problems ever grow to “‘celebrity’ status, the dominant top- ics of political and social discourse” (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988: 57). These two elements—peaks and troughs, and competition between issues—remain the basis for Downloaded from hij.sagepub.com at CHINA MEDICAL COLLEGE LIBRARY on December 28, 2014 6 The International Journal of Press/Politics 20(1) understanding the presence of environmental issues across various international and media settings (see, for example, Beck 2009; Boykoff 2014). A third key element recognized in these studies