Journalism and Climate Crisis: Public Engagement, Media Alternatives recognizes that climate change is more than an environmental crisis. It is also a question of political and communicative capacity. This book enquires into which approaches to journalism, as a particularly important form of public communication, can best enable humanity to productively address climate crisis. The book combines selective overviews of previous research, normative enquiry (what should journalism be doing?) and original empirical case studies of environmental communication and media coverage in Australia and Canada. Bringing together perspectives from the fields of environmental communication and journalism studies, the authors argue for forms of journalism that can encourage public engagement and mobilization to challenge the powerful interests vested in a high-carbon economy - 'facilitative' and 'radical' roles particularly well-suited to alternative media and alternative journalism. Ultimately, the book argues for a fundamental rethinking of relationships between journalism, publics, democracy and climate crisis. This book will interest researchers, students and activists in environmental politics, social movements and the media.

This is a co-authored book of all new material on the topic of media democracy and activism.
The authors consider the ways in which media, particularly broadcast media is made by and for a narrow audience of white, middle-class, heterosexual, Westerners that conform to the ideal values of the governing body. They consider how certain demographics are denied representation in the news, how they are unable to afford new technologies (digitalization, the internet, broadband) and cannot afford the education in order to get employment in the media industries and thus gain equality in choosing content. The authors call this the democratic deficit of mainstream media and look at alternate forms of activism to redress the imbalance in the media. They consider ways in which new media like the internet could be used to allow multiple perspectives of the same event, rather than only one side of the story being broadcast, and then consider how this still negates the reason for the activism as the internet is not available to all.
The text considers the key concepts of political media theory. The main cast are all here: Gramsci, Bourdieu, Habermas, Baudrillard etc as well as the new activism groups - CPBF, Media Alliance, FAIR.
Freedom of speech and the importance of freedom of the media is more at debate now than ever before with the issuance of special journalism visas for British journalists to enter the USA and the whole BBC sexing up Iraq debacle, so the book will be quite topical if the authors deliver on time.

Journalism and Climate Crisis: Public Engagement, Media Alternatives recognizes that climate change is more than an environmental crisis. It is also a question of political and communicative capacity. This book enquires into which approaches to journalism, as a particularly important form of public communication, can best enable humanity to productively address climate crisis. The book combines selective overviews of previous research, normative enquiry (what should journalism be doing?) and original empirical case studies of environmental communication and media coverage in Australia and Canada. Bringing together perspectives from the fields of environmental communication and journalism studies, the authors argue for forms of journalism that can encourage public engagement and mobilization to challenge the powerful interests vested in a high-carbon economy - 'facilitative' and 'radical' roles particularly well-suited to alternative media and alternative journalism. Ultimately, the book argues for a fundamental rethinking of relationships between journalism, publics, democracy and climate crisis. This book will interest researchers, students and activists in environmental politics, social movements and the media.