It is not easy being green: A critical discourse and frame analysis of environmental advocacy on American television (original) (raw)
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“It’s Not Easy Being Green”: The Greenwashing of Environmental Discourses in Advertising
Canadian Journal of Communication, 2013
Under the political framework of free-market fundamentalism, corporations are appropriating environmental discourses through green capitalism and greenwashing. For environmental emancipation to occur, it is important to problematize the corporate discourses that put a price on nature and obfuscate the domination of nature by capital. The authors use an environmental political-economy framework to examine the ways particular products are represented through television advertising. Using a multimodal critical discourse analysis, they analyze three representations—Clorox Green Works cleaning products, the Ford Escape Hybrid, and Toyota Prius motor vehicles—in order to deconstruct and analyze how specific advertisements operate and how they contribute to problematic environmental discourses.
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REPRESENTATION OF ENVIRONMENTALISTS IN MEDIA: AN EVALUATION ON STEREOTYPES OF ENVIRONMENTALIST
When the historical course is examined, studies dealing with environmental problems, environment-human relations, and the link among environment, industry and economy, exhibit a wide range in their approaches to determine problems and find solutions since environmental problems have become a worldwide issue. Within this range, environmentalist movements play a significant role in the point of contributing to the solution of problems or spotting these problems. Many environmentalist movements strive for calling attention to the problems that could lead to the termination of humanity such as global warming, environmental pollution, drought, and animal and plant species becoming extinct. For this purpose, environmentalists organize events that could make an impact in the media. Greenpeace is distinguished as an organization performing impressive protest demonstrations and acts in order to point out to environmental problems. An environmentalist stereotype has been formed in media due both to the striking acts and to the attitudes, states and appearances of environmentalists participating in these acts. Assuming that news stories are also a reconstruction of the truth, the environmentalist stereotype in environmental news by media forms the subject of this research. The study will reveal what kind of stereotypes is produced in the news reports relating to environmentalists. The basic question to be answered in this research is whether environmentalists are presented in the news reports in a marginalized or magazine-like form, or they are addressed with appropriate gravity.
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VISUAL IMAGES AND THE RHETORIC OF ENVIRONMENTAL ADVOCACY
This project investigates visual representations of staged environmental protests that are produced and distributed by the environmental-activist organization Greenpeace, and broadcast through international news media. By examining eight images taken from four separate Greenpeace image campaigns, this thesis shows how these demonstrations generally, and images of them more specifically, draw attention to climate change issues through their rhetorical capacity to challenge dominant cultural values that have enabled climate-changing human activities to persist. As such, the rhetorical capacity of these images further demonstrates Kevin DeLuca’s image event theory, which suggests how visual demonstrations can be designed to attract mass media attention that then leads to public advocacy and adherence. More specifically, this thesis argues that a novel understanding of Kenneth Burke’s paired concepts of identification and disidentification can show us precisely how Greenpeace’s rhetorical agenda unfolds, how their visual representations of extreme environmental activism and advocacy challenge cultural values that support environmentally damaging industrializing practices and the subordination of nature to human progress. To support my argument, Chapter 1 establishes a context for environmental advocacy, describing both the scientific consensus surrounding climate change issues, as well as the mixed opinions held by the public about these very same issues. Chapter 2 examines the academic literature concerning visual rhetoric and environmental advocacy, and introduces DeLuca’s image event theory and Burke’s concepts of identification and disidentification as exploratory lenses through which visual representations of extreme environmental advocacy can be studied. Chapter 3 performs a close reading and analysis of eight images from Greenpeace demonstrations, and outlines the mechanisms through which they achieve their rhetorical effects. Lastly, Chapter 4 posits that visual representations of extreme environmental activism and advocacy provide Greenpeace with a much larger mouthpiece in the world than they could ever achieve using traditional approaches to advocacy and conventional channels of public and political debate. As such, the study concludes that the visual rhetoric of environmental activists has the capacity to perform ideological critique in the process of reshaping public perceptions of climate change issues.
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Spectacular Environmentalisms: Media, Knowledge and the Framing of Ecological Politics
As we move firmly into the so-called Anthropocene—an era defined by human-induced global environmental change, neoliberal, consumer capitalism and the unprecedented flow of media, knowledge and communication—how is it that we know about the environment? More specifically: how is it we know about human-environment relationships—those tension-filled, ever-present, often-obscured, but inescapable relationships that are most likely overlain by some form of capitalist social relations? How do we know about ecological destruction embedded in these current human-environment relationships? How do we know what to do about the increasingly solid spectres of climate change and irretrievable biodiversity losses as well as the ordinarily polluted cities and fields many live in but count on for survival? As we and the authors of this special issue of Environmental Communication contend, given the growing prominence of media and celebrity in environmental politics, we now increasingly know about the environment through different forms, processes and aspects of the spectacle and, in particular, the spectacular environments of a progressively diverse media-scape. Moreover—and forming the core focus of this issue—we argue that we are more and more being told about how to ‘solve’ ecological problems through spectacular environmentalisms: the spectacularised, environmentally-focused media spaces that are differentially political, normative and moralised and that traverse our everyday public and private lifeworlds.
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Too Influential or Too Inadequate? A Critical Discourse Analysis of Environmental Advertising
2020
This study focused on how environmental advertising constructs messages and shapes reality for consumers. Guided by discourse theory, this study used critical discourse analysis to examine and thematize images of environmental advertisements, resulting in the four themes of personalizing, personification, time, and shock value over specifics. From these findings and their analysis, it became clear that today’s consumers of environmental advertising are in a predicament: these advertisements create unwarranted feelings of responsibility, blame, and pressure, while simultaneously falling short in offering substantive advice on how to make meaningful change. To address this twofold problem, this study created a guide to be a more critical consumer of media, as well as a suggested media campaign to offer a better approach to environmental advertising.
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Eco-Images and Environmental Activism: A Sociosemiotic Analysis
"“Nature never speaks by itself,” least of all in ecological discourses, where the line between brand-marketing strategies and the protection of nature is continually blurred. Strategies employed by activists testify that the crisis of nature is being constantly represented and renegotiated by different social actors. The ever-growing number of unconventional advertising campaigns executed by environmental organizations is a clear sign of the changeable nature of discourses about the crisis of the environment. One of the most interesting and yet unexplored aspects of the mediatization of nature is the continuous evolution of visual communication strategies used by environmental movements to denounce the ecosystem crisis and to influence public opinion. In recent years, we have noted an increase in greenwashing practices: the intentional dissemination of misleading or unsubstantiated information by organizations in order to conceal their abuse of the environment, or to promote vaguely formulated “sustainable practices” and products to present a positive public image. If we focus on the “responsibility” of images in the context of green/greenwashed strategies, two elements become obvious. On the one hand, we can detect the communication strategies adopted by corporations to reassert their environmental commitment. On the other hand, we see the political use of images by ecological movements and organizations, in particular their creative re-appropriation of the visual imagery of sustainability. The imagery used here can be categorized as eco-imagery."
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