Making the environment news - reporting industrial pollution in Durban : the local is the global

Abstract

The current round of corporatisation and commercialisation of media organisations has put severe pressures on serious, critical and independent news journalism around the world. Coverage of complex issues has, in many contexts, declined due to increased pressures for cost efficiency. Environmental issues pose a severe challenge to established routines of news making, because they tend to involve long-term time frames, multi-faceted causal relations, and are characteristically associated with discourses of scientific expertise