Media

In 1968, two years before the first Earth Day, the Apollo 8 mission captured Earthrise, the first color image of earth. Four years later, the Apollo 17 mission took the now iconic image, The Blue Marble, the first to encompass the whole Earth. These photographs have become the most recognizable images of our planet, broadcast across the globe through our media, marking the beginnings of a shift in our conceptualization of the planet. In this chapter, Callison charts the relationship between the media and the environment, highlighting the roles played by different media (television, radio, newspapers, etc.) in the development of new environmental policies, and exploring the different ways in which climate change, and the Earth, has been represented – for example, in its 1989 issue, Time magazine replaced its ‘Person of the Year’ with our ‘Planet of the Year’, beneath the headline, ‘Endangered Earth’. However, in the 1990s, media outlets began to shift their coverage away from environmental issues and science topics more generally, with some national media outlets questioning the legitimacy of climate change, despite progressively more urgent scientific reports being published. In this chapter, Callison examines media coverage of climate change through the last fifty years, addressing, among other themes, the slippery character of climate change as a news story, and the failure of media coverage to represent diversity in human experience and relations. In 2020, our myriad of handheld devices connect us globally in ways that weren’t imaginable fifty years ago; yet, despite this digital infrastructure, how connected we feel to each other, and how informed we are, is still equivocal.