Media representational practices in the Anthropocene Era

Media representational practices are vitally important to conceptions of challenges and possibilities for action to address the issue of anthropogenic climate change. They shape processes between science, policy and the public and thereby influence issues of governance and practices in our everyday lives and livelihoods in the twenty-first century. Many complex factors contribute to media representation practices: external (such as political economic challenges associated with corporate media consolidation) as well as internal influences (such as contributions from the deployment of journalistic norms). In this chapter, I touch on salient and swirling factors that contribute to how issues, events and information have often become climate ‘news’n about anthropogenic climate change. To the extent that these pressures have led to problematic representational practices, media coverage of climate change has contributed to misperceptions, misleading debates, and divergent understandings. Such practices are therefore detrimental to efforts that seek to enlarge rather than constrict the spectrum of possibility for appropriate responses to various environmental challenges.