The Monitor Environmental Forum Blog

A response to “The Monitor Environmental Forum: Initiating a Journalistic Shift” found Vol. 15, Iss. 2, P. 4.

I appreciate your intentions in your recent editorial in the Monitor Environmental Forum.  Educating yourself and peers is always a laudable intent, and I often find that it is helpful to question our assumptions, including those we get from the media.
However, I think you have a misleadingly nostalgic view of journalism in this country.  If anything, I believe the media has become more transparent to the average American.  More people are graduating from high school than ever before, and more are pursuing advanced degrees, so I don’t think we’re any more ignorant than our predecessors.  For generations the average citizen believed whatever they heard in ads and newspapers.  To give an example of media “spin,” some posters in World War I portrayed Germans as monstrous, greenish gorillas.  Americans had a pretty romantic, “us versus them” view of war until the Vietnam War, when journalists took photos in the heat of battle.  Many say that this was a major turning point in American journalism and culture, in which we began to more critically question both media messages and our government.
I think journalism has always tended to be, “sensationalized and homogenized.”  If we notice it any more now, that is simply a sign that we are becoming more aware—and we should celebrate that step toward clarity.
I don’t think, “sustenance and preservation of the environment, locally and globally, are more or less foreign concepts.”  First, I think that many people, particularly those in rural areas, are acutely aware of what happens to their environment because it affects their quality of life.  Consider Kirksville’s significant campaign to protect the water quality of Sugar Creek a few years ago, or the protest to the CAFO that was reported in the Monitor on September 2 this year.
In fact, “America’s insatiable hunger for consumerism” is ironically becoming one of the greatest champions of environmental awareness in over a decade.  What I mean is that environmentalism has come back into fashion; we see the push towards organic foods and recycling in our grocery stores, and T-shirts and bags encouraging us to “BE GREEN” in our malls.  I’m sure that many people who have taken a sudden interest are also educating themselves on how to preserve the planet, and maybe they will think twice before the next consumer fad rolls around.
Finally, I agree that the ELF activists should have their own voice to add to the media, but I regret that they seem to have forsaken it by using sheer violence.  Writers like you can be far more articulate and have amore positive impact on their audience than arsonists ever could.  I applaud your defense of their message, and their right to speak.

Thanks so much for reading and for making the effort to speak out through the Monitor.

– Laura Ferry

I will admit you raise a point of general accuracy; our media has advanced from the war propaganda age, certainly.  On the other hand, one of the many elements that has not changed in media’s content is its sense to coerce through its subtexts.  Granted the example of media you identify was government-produced, it was still the mass media.  Today’s mass media provides yet another message, and this message is not far unlike your example.  We are not given dramatic, romantic characters in the sense we viewed the Nazis, but we’re given similar menaces like, for example, Hugo Chavez – a man first elected by a landslide and remains popular amongst his people but not the wealthy media owners.  We, as a mass population, do not question Chavez’s policies – we question his character when he calls Bush, “The Devil” and the US, “evil.”  Our majority’s only basis for which to understand Chavez and his character is through the media.  How many in this country question Chavez as a leader of his own people more than they question his stability as an international leader (with considerably high economic importance to the US)?
It’s a matter of what perspective the media is creating.  In the more specific example I draw on the environment and that specific example of the people of the Seattle, Washington suburbs and the ELF, I demand for us to observe what is the subtext of our media’s coverage.  So, what is it?  I conclude that because of our wild, insatiable hunger for consumption, our culture’s overarching capitalist ideals, and our basic misunderstanding of the motivations behind the environmental movement (to which capitalism offers little to no beneficial supplement), the media is unable to create a medium that will foster a socially, environmentally equitable message.
This is what brings me to your next point about the new wave of “green” marketing.  This shift in consumption, whether it is progressive or a lateral, is a subject worth more time and space than a simple response could offer.  Thank you very much, Laura, for your response.  In the next issue of The Monitor, you can expect a more detailed submission on the subject of “green” consumerism.  I also would like to thank everyone that submitted his or her responses to the first forum topic.  More replies soon.  Thank you again for your consideration.
Please submit any responses to Ryan at monitor.environment@gmail.com