Ed. note: Originally published in part in: Cottle, S. (2023). ‘Reporting civilizational collapse: Research notes from a world-in-crisis.’ Global Media and Communication, 19(2), 269-288. https://doi.org/10.1177/17427665231186934
Part 1 was published on Resilience.org here.
We live at the dawn of a new age, or, more probably, at the dusk of a dying age that presages no new ages at all. The language of civilizational and ecological collapse (as reviewed in Living in a World—in-Crisis: Thinking Beyond Catastrophism Part 1) is starting to circulate. We hear it in the considered prose of scientific reports and academic writing, in the expressive genres of film and fiction, and in the anguished pleas of growing numbers of protestors, such as Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and Fridays for Future, on the streets. But we hear it obliquely and occasionally at most in the mainstream news media. Here it is marginalised within source hierarchies and remains dependent on periodic ‘newsworthy’ events. For most of the time, voices seeking to raise the alarm and respond to immanent processes of unfolding world collapse, are unheard in the mainstream news media. And this notwithstanding the daily bombardment of press accounts and televisual scenes of lost and smashed infrastructure, of failing global supply chains, food shortages and forced migrations, of desolated environments and destroyed wildlife, of megafires and melting icecaps.
Reporting the planetary emergency: diluted, disaggregated, dissimulated
The world of journalism continues to occupy a pivotal role in today’s complex media ecology and in the communication of different global crises. It also performs a crucial part in the axial crisis of perception discussed in Part 1, and how we apprehend and make sense of today’s planetary demise and evident polycrisis at the heart of today’s world-in-crisis. Journalism often proves critical in the framing of disasters and crises, it also enters into them and their subsequent unfolding by influencing political, social and cultural responses and facilitating their wider reverberations around the world (Cottle 2009a,b, 2011, 2022). Journalism historically has assumed the responsibility of raising the alarm and signalling the latest catastrophic events and informing civil society of their magnitude, repercussions, and onward trajectory (Carey 1996, Cottle 2014). Journalism also serves to visually dramatize, culturally symbolise and meaningfully narrate the human stories and emotions of global crises (Cottle 2009a., 2013, Smith and Howe 2015). In these ways it both breathes and oxygenates the cultural air of sense making and helps orient society to the world we live in. And so too can journalism variously stage public debates and political deliberation that give vent to the stakeholder disagreements that flow in, through and around crises, their political prescriptions, and wider responses.
Mainstream journalism we also know, however, is institutionally entrenched, economically determined, and often culturally and politically aligned to predominantly national structures of power and established social networks (Bennett 2021, Cottle 2006). And in recent years the practice of journalism has also become increasingly fractured in polarised political cultures and its truth-claims challenged by populist leaders deliberately espousing post-truth politics, while the rise of social media has further served to fragment audiences and news provision into self-selecting ‘echo-chambers.’
Mainstream journalism, with very few exceptions, is proving slow to recognise, contextualise and represent the severity and compound nature of existential crises now confronting human society and the planet. It continues for the most part to report in ‘existentially averse’ ways, preferring not to join up the dots of a ‘world-in-crisis’ or foresee immanent and imminent processes of breakdown and collapse. It sees the world through established professional and normative outlooks oriented to a world of ‘business-as-usual’ and ‘life-as-normal.’ When reporting on the most catastrophic global crises, this proves deficient and dissimulates the complex underpinning of today’s planetary emergency. Consider for example three of the most globally pressing crises of recent times: climate change, Covid-19, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. To what extent and how has each been reported in global context and sought to draw out the complex underpinning and entanglements of today’s world-in-crisis?
Recent reporting of IPCC reports, COP26 and, more recent and belatedly, extreme weather events, have all sought to incorporate and relay scientific warnings about the inexorable advance of climate change. But this reporting is at best institutionally intermittent and event dependent, whether on the release of the latest IPCC report, the public staging of COP events, or major protests. Extreme weather events and the latest breaking of past weather records can also create opportunities for recognising and signalling the onward march of climate catastrophes, though this is not always followed through. Noticeably mainstream media quickly retreat to their preferred ‘business as usual,’ ‘life as normal’ reporting and dilute and compartmentalize climate change, it seems, as an occasional and truncated newsworthy issue only. It is generally not reported as an existential threat warranting daily exposure and multi-faceted depth reporting on par, say, with previous collective fights for survival in times of total war. And rarely is it reported from the global to the local in its complex entanglement with the manifold expressions of today’s world-in-crisis – whether collapsing ecologies, human migration, food and water scarcity or increased prevalence of disease.
Unlike climate change the reporting of the Covid pandemic in most liberal democracies was granted daily prominence and, exceptionally, became characterized by daily updates, elite briefings, and mediated dispatches from the frontlines of health care, as well as from the home front of lockdown (Cottle 2022). Unlike the slow-burn of climate change, Covid-19 visibly impacted health and mortality, economies, and everyday life in dramatic ways. The world of journalism generally failed, however, to explore probable connections between this global public health disaster and its likely ecological underpinnings as a zoonotic disease (UNEP 2016, WWF 2020). And the liminal period of the economic slow-down and personal lockdown of behaviour was not used to seriously reappraise and rethink the world of work, wellbeing and our relationship to the natural world or the opportunity to seriously cut back on carbon emissions through shifts to homeworking, travel and changed consumption patterns. This business as usual, life as normal, normative reporting continues to shape news in the post-period of endemic Covid.
Reporting of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been compelled to recognise and report on the entanglement of European economies, the continuing high dependency on hydrocarbon fuels, and the implications of restricted supplies on country plans to transition to clean energies and nuclear power in the context of climate change. The forced migrations of millions of people, precipitation of a world food crisis, shortage of fertilizer and rising prices and the renewed fears of nuclear escalation have also all featured in the reporting of this devastating Russian invasion. However, Western news reporting has tended to report such global system complexity and interdependency through a normative and nationally inflected news lens. This has focused predominantly, at the time of writing, on national economic instability, energy sovereignty and impact on consumers prices as well as the mass exodus of refugees amidst the daily military updates and political responses. The reporting for the most part does not contextualise and examine the Ukraine crisis as part of a preceding world-in-crisis including the urgency of COP26 commitments to reduce carbon emissions, and it ignores the military carbon expenditure and routinely dissimulates the devastating ecological impacts of contemporary warfare (Cottle 2023).
Accounting for Journalism’s ‘Great Derangement’
As we heard in Part 1, Amitav Ghosh argues we are living in ‘The Great Derangement’ (Ghosh, 2016), a time of widespread denial, political disavowal and collective insanity as the world continues on its ‘business as usual’ and ‘life as normal’ path, a path that is inexorably taking us to the precipice. The explanations for this generally disaggregating and dissimulating response to the planetary emergency in the field of mainstream journalism, even when focusing on three of its most prominent expressions, are well known and can be quickly rehearsed.
It is well known, for example, that mainstream news providers are corporate entities shaped by political economy determinants (concentrated ownership, market competition and the pursuit of profits with a focus on ratings, readers and revenue). They also operate in a field of strategic power and vested interests, that shapes and delimits news agendas and public discourse. And so too do they give expression to historically and culturally prevailing worldviews (Cottle 2006, Shudson 2019, Bennett 2021).
In more institutionally and professionally proximate terms, news agendas, story selections and framing can also be understood in relation to the operation of basic news values (Harcup and O’Neil 2017), elite source dependencies and elite indexing (Bennett and Lawrence 2006), and the enactments of objectivity, impartiality and balance (Boycoff and Boycoff, 2007), as well as competing news appeals of scientific and social rationality (Cottle 2000).
The event orientation of news, whether, for example, focused on protests, conferences or press releases, can also be institutionally out of synch with planetary and crisis temporalities (Bødker and Morris 2022), whether slow-burn disasters or permanent emergencies (see also Zelizer 2017, 2021). And the pragmatic division of journalist labour into ‘news beats’ and specialist correspondents (Robbins and Wheatley, 2021), can further reinforce the cognitive division of the world into separate ‘issues.’
The established communicative architecture or standard forms and formats of journalism, further, and variously, enables and disables ideational and imagistic, analytical and affective, expositional and expressive, and display and deliberative modes of reporting (Cottle and Rai 2006), including when reporting planetary crises.
Professional journalist codes of conduct and newsroom expectations of journalist practice and conformity we also know are reinforced through structures of newsroom recruitment, hierarchy, and processes of story assignment and career progression.
Each of the above in their own ways, then, helps to account for the diluted, disaggregated and dissimulating reporting of today’s world-in-crisis. However, in addition, the world of journalism and journalist sense-making overlaps with the wider cultural field that we many of us inhabit and here shared phenomenological and psychological dispositions are also often ‘at work’.
The phenomenological hold of taken-for-granted background expectations about life, work and daily routines, for example, can play into habituated journalist thinking and reporting outlooks. This is rooted in the temporalities of everyday life, in its routinised practices and, to borrow Marx’s phrase, the ‘dull compulsion of the economic’ (the necessity of working to pay bills and to live) as well as private life and family commitments which, together, conspire to reproduce the phenomenological sense of life’s ongoing daily continuity, rather than its immanent disruption or even destruction. A disposition that is at odds with fully recognising and reporting with full gravitas warnings of planetary collapse.
The psychology of denial and disavowal (Gillespie 2020) can also be in the mix of contributing explanations for journalism’s seeming existential reporting aversion. A potentially discomforted psychology can be differently enacted by journalists who variously, for example, either know, defer to some distant horizon, or blatantly deny the coming planetary apocalypse. This personalised response can further become institutionalised in an editorial line and paternalistic response to imagined audiences by differing news organisations. This, for example, can produce a purposefully massaged or diluted presentation of unpalatable messages about processes of breakdown and immanent (or imminent) collapse, and which can also be seen by journalists as a useful way of warding of the charge of alarmism or doomerism when reporting in a politically fractured field.
Journalism’s Future Imaginaries
From the discussion above mainstream journalism, with few exceptions, is generally oriented to reporting through a dominating worldview of economic growth, materialist ideas of progress, and unspoken presumption of human exceptionalism – mutually reinforcing premises that are antithetical to an ecological sensibility and sustainable future way of life. As also indicated, journalism and its increasingly complex world-news ecology (Cottle 2012, Chadwick 2013, Reese 2016) are situated and shaped in a force-field of power, economics, and vested interests (Bennett 2021). But journalism is also capable of giving expression to and sometimes channelling the changing concerns and moral horizons of the civil sphere (Alexander 2006, Cottle 2019) – and these are on now on the move (see Part 1).
Journalism is critically positioned to not only report on and deepen understanding about the accelerating trajectory of existential crises – global, systemic, and complexly intertwined – and needs to do so with an overriding sense of daily urgency, but also to report extensively on today’s growing ecological consciousness and the forging of pathways to transition and transformation. A new ‘journalist imagination’ or ‘journalistic imaginary’ is both needed and, increasingly compelled, by the onward crush of deepening economic and ecological crises. Such a journalistic imaginary would be re-oriented in at least eight distinguishable ways, each of which provides critical benchmarks of use in the critical appraisal and encouragement of journalism change in the years ahead.
First, a culture of reporting today’s world-in-crisis or planetary emergency needs to take root across mainstream news media as well as outside it, and with an enhanced sense of planetary urgency. This needs to be comparable perhaps to reporting in times of ‘total war’, where a societal ethos of ‘we’re in this together’ is established both in the field of reporting and beyond.
Second, reporting needs to increasingly recognise the complex entanglement of seemingly distinct crises in a world-in-crisis. Such reporting must be undertaken with expanded vision on how accelerating and deepening global crises originate and reverberate around the world, and not solely viewed through parochial and nationally inflected news glasses (Beck 2009, Cottle 2011, Berglez 2013).
Third, news presentism and journalism’s preferred temporality of ‘here and now’ reporting (Zelizer 2017), must be expanded to fit the unfolding temporalities of potential extinction. A temporality, in other words, in which future imaginaries, whether premised on predictions of collapse or the politics of transition, are deemed to be legitimate timescapes for news reporting.
Fourth, journalism must give increased recognition to, and communicatively enhance, the public elaboration of pathways of transition and societal transformation and deepen its critical reporting of policy initiatives at transnational, national and sub-national levels. It must also recognise and give voice to the cultural flourishing of ideas and pre-figurative politics of deep adaptation and growing ecological awareness. An ecological sensibility implies affective, experiential and emotional engagement and this, we know, can be sustained through the cultural and symbolic resonance of images and ‘moving’ film and human-focused storytelling, as well as informational and deliberative forms of news presentation (Cottle and Rai 2006, Lester and Cottle 2009).
Fifth, journalism will need to seek to creatively deploy, innovate and expand its established communicative architecture and traditional modes of reporting when visualising and dramatizing, narrating and telling, expressing and deliberating stories that speak to our world-in-crisis (Cottle and Rai 2006, Parks 2020). And to do so in and through the digital affordances currently available and in and across today’s interconnecting ‘world news ecology (Cottle 2012, 2014). In today’s digitised ‘world news ecology’ this includes multiple news sites and advocacy groups, such as, for example, Resilience, The Climate Journal or Imagine who are dedicated to ecological projects of recognition and change and compile original reports based on independent expertise and delivered with editorial skills of storytelling. Ways of enhancing communicative interactions between alternative sites and mainstream news providers should be pursued, helping to sensitise journalists to compelling new stories, lived experiences and new sources of expertise.
Sixth, journalistic reflexivity needs to be encouraged in ways that are better aligned to the reporting of planetary existential threats. Here the possible promise of various alternative and/or complementary models of journalism practice and orientation (public/civic journalism (Rosen 1999), development journalism (Waisbord 2009), peace journalism (McGoldrick and Lynch, 2005), humanitarian journalism (Wright et al 2019), engaged journalism (Nettlefold 2022), and constructive or solutions-based journalism (MacIntyre 2019) need to be explored and, when productive, deployed within the journalist imaginary to reporting existential threats. Examples of industry ‘good practice’, say, The Guardian newspaper’s Climate Pledge (2019), and its ongoing commitment to ecological reporting or broadcasting examples of infrequent but excellent ‘global journalism’ and the reporting of synchronous and entangled global crises, should be publicly valorised and where possible expanded across mainstream news outlets and platforms.
Seventh, journalism as with the rest of society needs to participate in a grown-up and ongoing conversation about the C-word, and how runaway financial and corporate capitalism and the elective affinity of normative ideas of incessant growth, material progress and human exceptionalism, have brought the planet to its current demise. To borrow the words of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “It’s time to say: enough. Enough of brutalizing biodiversity. Enough of killing ourselves with carbon. Enough of treating nature like a toilet. Enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper.” (Opening speech of the UN Climate Change Conference COP26, Glasgow, Scotland, 1.11.21). Journalism is positioned to become a political crucible of contention and opposing ideas, as well as a cultural forum for the expression and flowering of sentiments toward ecology and its degradations. This is often lived and enacted at the local level, and local news providers have an obligation to give expression to local initiatives and projects for change, which so far remains underdeveloped.
Eighth, more compassionate forms of journalism will be required that recognise the collective and psychological trauma of people experiencing the sharp end of catastrophe and the legitimate fears of all those now waking up to the planetary emergency and its impacts not only on human society but the ecological web of life (Gillespie 2020, Macey 2021) and, increasingly, this will involve journalists themselves.
Journalism’s Future Imaginary: An idealism or compelled?
When read through the prism of current understanding of journalism organisation and constraints such a journalistic imaginary will seem to many, well, just that, imaginary! Naïve, flawed and/or hopelessly idealistic may also come to mind. When based on what we already know from political economy, the sociology of news and sources, and culture of journalism practice and performance (Cottle 2006, 2009a,b, 2011), this is understandable. But we are no longer living in ‘normal times,’ whatever historically they are, and the trajectories of decline and collapse only look set to accelerate and deepen in the years ahead. As in historical times of ‘total war’, it is possible to anticipate and indeed to collectively demand that journalism better orients itself, and us, to the world and its existential demise. Journalism need not always be assumed to be historically static or intransigent to change (Carey 1996, Zelizer 2017, Shudson 2019). The juggernaut of late modernity (Giddens 1990) can also give birth to its nemesis. It’s in the ecological air we breathe as much as the compelled politics and changing economic relations forced to adapt to an increasingly catastrophised world. This is the terrain of Beck’s societal metamorphosis that complexly, in myriad and often understated ways, reaches down into everyday life, into institutions and ways of doing things, and begins to form an ‘epochal change of horizons’ (Beck 2015: 77).
Journalism historically has the proven capacity to recalibrate and readjust its cultural sights, its collective moral compass, though not always for the better it is true. But we should not overlook or downplay the part played by modern means of communication in the deepening of democratic expectations (Scannell 1989) and in the advance of progressive movements of change (Cottle 2004, Alexander 2006): whether in respect of the civil rights movement challenging racism, gender equality and new identity politics, or the universal recognition of human rights and struggles for animal welfare and environmental justice around the world.
Journalism takes its cue not only from owners and powerful vested interests, but professionally and culturally from the metaphorical winds of change blowing through wider society. In hot-housed times literally blasted by winds of change, in times of ’anthropological shock’ and ‘enforced enlightenment,’ the politics of ‘emancipatory catastrophism’ finds a foothold and may even be set loose (Beck 2015). In such circumstances journalism can become increasingly compelled to not only acknowledge but also grant expression to views and voices challenging the business as usual, life as normal, worldview, a view long past its sell-by-date in a visibly dying world.
Journalism’s imaginary, increasingly calibrated to a world-in-crisis, also need not be assumed to be a sudden and unlikely moment of ideological conversion, but as an ongoing process of societal metamorphosis in the fading dusk of world civilization and in the gathering vortex of demands for transition and societal transformation to a more sustainable (and survivable) world. Indeed, there are already some grounds to say that this is already emergent in some sectors and some outlets of the current journalism field – whether in respect of the political reporting, for example, of top-down policies and programmes of energy transition or the cultural valorisation of small-scale initiatives and enterprises oriented to grass roots sustainability and ecological wellbeing. We see it in the reporting of attempted regearing of economies in a slew of top-down government policies and elaborate programmes that seek, if not always coherently or with sufficient urgency and vision, to move enterprises and behaviours to a carbon neutral, or much reduced fossil-fuelled world. This includes meaningful shifts in every economic sector, including energy, transport, housing, food production and the provision of local services (Porritt 2021, Kaplinsky 2021).
This top-down national state-politics and international supra-politics, however, does not exhaust the creative flourishing of ideas and practices which also bubble and ferment in the sub-political spaces of the creative economy and in the relatively invisible spaces and imagined horizons of the civil sphere. Here we find an eclectic cornucopia of productive ideas and shifting sensibilities. These include, for example, the ideas of deep adaptation and practices of regenerative culture and agriculture, rewilding and relocalisation; an appreciation of traditional indigenous wisdom based on ecologically sustainable relationships and reciprocity; ideas of circular, steady-state and alternative economies, of post-growth, de-growth and a new green deal and much else besides. This cultural flourishing informs the practices and pre-figurative politics of ecological consciousness and thinking about the web-of-life and emergent future imaginary of the Symbiocene (Lent 2021), as we heard previously.
Journalism Inside the Web of Life
To repeat, whether we know it or not, our life chances and indeed the continuing chance of Life on planet Earth, has become a race to ecological consciousness. Journalism can yet perform an indispensable and vitalizing role in signalling, symbolising, and staging the inescapable necessity for deep adaptation and pathways of transition. It can do so by scrutinizing and exploring the credibility of government and corporate policies and by giving expression to the flourishing of ideas and pre-figurative practices built on imagined futures and compelled new horizons in the civil sphere and across the pluriverse of different cultures around the globe.
The axial crisis of perception, as suggested in Part 1 of this essay, is fundamentally at the core of today’s world-in-crisis, and journalism occupies a key position in either continuing to fuel a dominating worldview that has brought the world to probable collapse, or help furnish an ecological sensibility and consciousness that could yet build pathways of transition and transformation to a socially and ecologically just way of inhabiting planet Earth. Journalism is not outside of society and culture, as we are not outside of the web of life. The prospects for journalism stepping up to the great existential challenges of our time will become both compelled by the onward crush of catastrophes and the encounter with system breakdowns, as well as cultivated in the wider awakening to the necessity for change and transformation informed by a growing ecological sensibility and consciousness. In respect of the axial crisis of perception, journalism, in all its differentiated forms, I suggest, is not destined forever to remain part of the problem, and unthinkingly reproduce the Great Derangement of our times. It could yet become both compelled and cultivated to be an integral part of the solution to living within the web of life.
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