What Comes from Confronting a Growing 'Certainty'? Exploring How UK Journalism Reports the Politics of Climate Change

This paper discusses a growing 'certainty' on the seriousness of the climate change issue observed in UK elite reporting. It identifies this type of reporting as produced by a process to 'domesticate' the issue in the UK. Important within this domestication process is an elite politicization of climate change where political actors demonstrate forms of token 'cultural leadership' alongside voiced concerns to combat this potentially disruptive issue. Equally significant are UK journalists' efforts to mediate these frequent elite commentaries according to the interests and the practices of elite journalism logic and, in turn, to report them alongside scientific and civil society voices and perspectives on the issue. This paper introduces the frames and voices found in the UK elite reporting and recognises how this coverage contrasts with coverage argued previously to be replete with climate scepticism and/ or elite challenges to climate change. Further, with UK domestication set to intensity, it suggests that we will likely see elite UK journalism confronting a growing controversy over the policy and the actions used to adapt to and mitigate the outcomes of climate change. Not only will political elites seek to hone their claims making to respond to the concerns raised by international political actors then but also to quell growing criticism voiced by interest groups on the home front. Given this developing situation, we may even see elite journalistic voices joining reporting and acting their fourth estate role when calling for further action

Reporting to audiences in crisis: Disruption, criticism and absent hope in TV journalisms’ rendering of the impactful UK energy price rises

How does journalism communicate to audiences who are experiencing crisis? Existing literature suggests that journalists use reporting templates and related practices to report crises with elite narratives and myths (and some ‘disruptive factors’, on occasion). Their news audiences, it follows, are understood as observers of abstracted crisis rather than as those who are experiencing crisis impacts as immediate and affecting. Such thinking becomes challenged by the emerging UK energy crisis. Analysing the corresponding TV journalism shows its reporting responds to several unique disruptive aspects of the crisis (i.e. its ‘seriality’, ‘unpredictability’ and ‘impacts’) rather than reproduce expected myths and authority skew. Additionally, it forms potentially transformative coverage with an included critical commentary on elite inaction and profiteering. Still, omitted at the same time is any relevant explanation and assistance for those audiences affected by the soaring energy costs. The paper argues, subsequently, that this journalism is producing a crisis subjectivity that serves only to reflect back accounts of ‘close suffering’ and uncertainty to audiences, without any sense of hope, support or meaningful action

A Missing Link? The Imagined Audience, News Practices and the Production of Children's News

Based on a production study of the distinct and unique children's news programme, BBC Newsround, this paper explores the place of the professional understanding of the target audience as a “missing link” within the news-making process. Approaching programme production with this concern uncovers the particular understandings of the target audience that inform journalists’ news culture and professional views. Further revealed is how such ideas, when traced within the news production process, explain the particularised practices that condition and shape “appropriate” news representations for the audience. The paper concludes with an assessment of the impact of these professional ideas on the dialogical possibilities of the children's news programme

Creating a New(s) View of the Environment: How Children's News Offers New Insights intoNews Forms, Imagined Audiences and the Production of Environmental Issues

Based on a production study of children's news, this article examines the unique new(s) views of the environment created by news programming. Children's news programmes, such as the BBC's programme Newsround, construct a new(s) view of environmental degradation. Studying the children's news programme thus provides insights into the unexplored relationship between news differentiation and environmental news representations. This particular investigation explores and demonstrates how Newsround and its informing conception of its child audience produces a simplified and personalized view of the environment, which powerfully undermines a reasoned understanding of the relationship between human beings and the natural world. By this means it examines the important connections between news conventions, news programmes and new(s) views of the environment

Negotiating News Childhoods: News Producers, Visualized Audiences and the Production of the Children's News Agenda

This paper, based on a case study of the production of the BBC children's news programme, Newsround, examines the importance of professionals' views of children's “childhood” within programme production. Approaching media production with this concern brings sharply into view how understandings of the young audience develop within journalists' culture. Further, the case study approach reveals how news practices inscribed with professionals' understandings of children's cognitive abilities, their interests and relationship to the news programme shape the production of the BBC children's programme. The paper concludes, on the basis of this study, that the news agenda conditioned in this process restricts children's access to knowledge, information and debate about important adult affairs

Performing the disaster genre? TV journalism, disruptive factors and community challenges in the reporting of the UK Grenfell Tower block fire

News coverage of national disasters holds the potential to evoke unique moral sentiments and political reactions. Often, however, we learn that the common use of elite political actors’ consensual commentary by journalists serves to politically appropriate such events or render mute their potential. This paper explores a challenge to this observed authority skew in the performance of TV journalism (BBC, ITN, Channel 4 and Channel 5) while covering the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower block fire. The analysed reporting shows that the presence of (i) disruptive geography (ii) disruptive expertise and (iii) disruptive commentary challenge the reproduction of a traditional ‘reporting template’ and its inscribed authority skew. Combined, such ‘disruptive factors’, it is reasoned, enable opportunities for challenger voices to appear in number, and therein direct criticisms of both neglect and inaction and even to reflect on the state, race and poverty and incite thereafter an elite political apology.</p

Media performance in the aftermath of terror: Reporting templates, political ritual and the UK press coverage of the London Bombings, 2005

This article examines newspaper reaction in the immediate aftermath of the London bombings 2005 to identify the repertoires they use to respond to this large-scale terrorist incident perpetrated on UK soil. It introduces to our established view of media reporting of terrorism, a moment when traditionally differentiated newspapers respond collectively to this incident with coverage marked by its representations of condemnation, solidarity and law and enforcement brought together within human-interest story treatments. These findings point to newspaper journalists employing a generic reporting template at this time to reproduce copy so ordered as to respond consensually to this incident. Newspapers’ performances across this period privilege official responses and collective national reaction to the bombings as they cauterise an identified social wound produced by the incident. Their investigation calls attention to the ritual character of reporting produced against this context, pointing in particular to the enacted images of ‘Britishness’ central to its performance

What Comes from Confronting a Growing 'Certainty'? Exploring How UK Journalism Reports the Politics of Climate Change

This paper discusses a growing 'certainty' on the seriousness of the climate change issue observed in UK elite reporting. It identifies this type of reporting as produced by a process to 'domesticate' the issue in the UK. Important within this domestication process is an elite politicization of climate change where political actors demonstrate forms of token 'cultural leadership' alongside voiced concerns to combat this potentially disruptive issue. Equally significant are UK journalists' efforts to mediate these frequent elite commentaries according to the interests and the practices of elite journalism logic and, in turn, to report them alongside scientific and civil society voices and perspectives on the issue. This paper introduces the frames and voices found in the UK elite reporting and recognises how this coverage contrasts with coverage argued previously to be replete with climate scepticism and/ or elite challenges to climate change. Further, with UK domestication set to intensity, it suggests that we will likely see elite UK journalism confronting a growing controversy over the policy and the actions used to adapt to and mitigate the outcomes of climate change. Not only will political elites seek to hone their claims making to respond to the concerns raised by international political actors then but also to quell growing criticism voiced by interest groups on the home front. Given this developing situation, we may even see elite journalistic voices joining reporting and acting their fourth estate role when calling for further action

Out of the Mouths of Babes and Experts': Children's News and What it can Teach us About News Access and Professional Mediation

Based on a participant observation study of the British children's news programme Newsround, this article explores how professional ideas of form and target audience condition and shape both the range of accessed news voices as well as the opportunities that these are granted on the news stage to elaborate their views, experiences and feelings. This case-study approach not only helps to map a hitherto unexplored form of television journalism but also throws into sharp relief professional news practices that inform the production of television news more generally. As such, it addresses an important silence in the conventional theorisation of news access and invites a more complex and culturally differentiated understanding of, and future approach to, news production and processes of professional mediation

Placing Industry in the Frame: Exploring the Mediated Performance of Industry Voices in Climate Change Reporting

It is now recognized that industry representatives influence the news reporting of climate change. Still, debate continues over the form and the extent of their influence particularly in the absence of detailed analysis of their presence across time. This paper places industry in the frame by analyzing their perspectives within a period of rapid politicization of the issue in the UK (2000–2010). Mapped across elite reporting, industry presence appears to be fluid, not static, and to respond to the politicization of the issue and to the journalistic logic that shapes elite coverage. Perhaps as expected, industry is pro-active in providing a perspective on climate change as an economic problem and projecting its “green credentials” in prime positions across the reporting. Mostly, however, this reporting uses its reactions to comment on other industry or elite activities, practices and policy. The findings show that interactions between the media and the political context underpin the observed outcomes of the pro-active and the re-active public relations by industry, in addition to shaping the presence of other speakers that contribute to the complex issue of climate change