Can media prioritise environmental crisis?

This year’s theme for World Press Freedom Day is ‘A press for the planet: Journalism in the face of the environmental crisis.’ Makes journalism sound important, right? We could use a bit of that given the beating the profession continues to get from all kinds of forces. I attended the commemorative event organised by the Media Sector Working Group online, listening to speakers discuss the importance of journalism for the environment. 

Ten years ago, I would have had to go physically to Makerere University, where the event was held. It reminded me of just how much things have changed, how technology has turned lives around, a little, upside down for good and sometimes, not for so good. 

Azeem Azar, in writing about how accelerating technology is leaving us behind and what to do about it, makes some interesting observations. He suggests that, ‘The technologies we build can take society in unexpected directions. When technology takes off, its effects can be enormous, stretching across all areas of life: our jobs, the wars we fight, the nature of our politics, even our manners and habits’. He goes further to suggest that technology is not ‘exogenous’ to the other forces that define our lives, combining political, cultural and social systems, ‘often in dramatic and unforeseen ways’. 

Journalism and media studies perhaps bear witness to this change in fairly dramatic ways.  Journalism and social media today, and their contribution to mitigating environmental crisis, must bear in mind the fact of science and technology. The old assumptions about the role of journalism are fading away, and quickly because the technological advances we talk about in the industry, have indeed changed things. 

Even on World Press Freedom Day in 2024, there are still people discussing journalism and social media as if they are one. And that is the challenge of our times. The limitation placed on journalism in contributing towards mitigating global environmental crisis is also inherently that of what makes news. If we treat news as the representation of reality by journalists and their media houses, it becomes difficult to consider the notion that environment is not interesting and does not, therefore, sell. Yet, that is the truth. 

Not many people like the truth. In stating a fact, one must explain why it qualifies as fact. Some of the complaints we get in journalism, are not because we have stated a fact as is, but that we have not done enough to explain why that is a fact.

My entry in journalism education was in 2005 when I enrolled for a postgraduate programme in environmental journalism at Makerere University, then funded by Sida. I had been writing and editing features for the West Niler newspaper in my free time and decided to make my relationship with journalism formal, through an education. It was interesting but then my life was in the academy. I continued to enjoy environmental stories that are often far and wide in between.

Now I teach development journalism and listen to my students persuade me about environmental reporting being boring. I hear editors talk about the disinterest of audiences in matters of environment. That is the dilemma of journalism and the environment. It has a crisis of its own to contend with.
Is it time to reconsider the framing of environmental issues in news? How can important issues of our day be of no interest to society, a society that faces those threats on a daily basis? How do we represent the issues of environmental crisis in ways that make them interesting and consumable?
 
In evaluating the role of journalism in covering the environmental crisis, we could use the lense of scholars like Arnold de Beer and Nicolene Botha, who suggest factoring in factors that affect journalistic frames of references such as the nature and policies of the news medium, the policy on and practice of newsworthiness; news values and news criteria; editorial organisation and quality of our news medium; the demographic profile, wants and needs of our audiences; and the social, political, economic and cultural systems in which the news medium operates. All these are important.

There is no doubt that we have serious problems in representing and consuming the representation of nature in media production. Any news media organisation interested in the pursuit of environmental journalism must necessarily understand the nature of these problems, which clearly go beyond a lack of funding for reporting on environment. 
That journalism is facing its own crisis is not a matter for debate. It is generally aggregable that for most people who watch the space, there are concerns. The question for us remains, can journalism rise above its own crisis to focus on environmental crisis in a meaningful way? That is worth continued consideration.

Ms Maractho (PhD) is a senior lecturer at Uganda Christian University.                                                    

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