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Climate change has been the subject of much research in various fields of the social sciences in recent decades, including that of communication. As a result, much evidence has been accumulated on the complex reality behind political inaction in this regard. However, when it comes to communicating this reality, the media, and part of academia, have tended to simplify this complexity by focusing on the climate countermovement and literal denialism of the phenomenon. This countermovement has been extensively studied in the United States, revealing the existence of a highly influential anthropogenic climate change denialism in that country. However, academic research has also shown that political inaction on the climate cannot be explained by denialism alone; not in the United States, and much less in Europe. In this article, we question the current indiscriminate use of the concept of denialism and suggest the incorporation of a more sophisticated conceptual and analytical framework that provides more nuance and aligns with the evidence emerging from academic research. It is a matter not only of critically communicating the reality of political inaction with regard to the climate, but also of identifying the entire spectrum of responsibilities, which are not limited to simply denying or not denying climate change. ; El cambio climático ha sido objeto de estudio frecuente desde distintos ámbitos de las ciencias sociales en las últimas décadas, también desde la comunicación. Gracias a ello, se ha generado una cada vez más abundante evidencia de la realidad compleja que se esconde tras la inacción política al respecto. Sin embargo, a la hora de comunicar esta realidad, los medios de comunicación, y una parte de la academia, han tendido a simplificar esta complejidad poniendo el foco en el contramovimiento climático y el negacionismo literal del fenómeno. Este contramovimiento ha sido abundantemente estudiado en los Estados Unidos, lo que ha puesto en evidencia la existencia de un negacionismo del cambio climático antropogénico muy influyente en ese país. Pero la investigación académica ha hecho también evidente que la inacción política al respecto del clima no puede explicarse solo con el concepto de negacionismo; ni en los Estados Unidos, ni mucho menos en Europa. En este artículo problematizamos el uso del concepto negacionismo en su uso indiscriminado actual y sugerimos incorporar un marco conceptual y de análisis más sofisticado, que aporte más matices y se alinee con las evidencias de la investigación académica. Se trata no solo de comunicar de forma crítica la realidad de la inacción política con respecto al clima sino de hacerlo también identificando todo el espectro real de responsabilidades, que no se reducen a negar o no negar el cambio climático.

This study examines the ideological slant of Spanish digital-native opinion journalism. Political-ideological pluralism is a well-researched topic in media and journalism studies, yet there is less research regarding this topic when it comes to exclusively online media. This paper addresses that gap concerning the ways online-only opinion journalism can be defined in terms of their political ideology, and to what extent extreme ideological positions are represented in online journalism. Evidence from a content analysis of opinion columns appearing in the most widely-read Spanish online newspapers, during the month of May 2011 shows a general anti-left bias in the opinion sections of the newspapers, as well as a representation of the political extremes that is slightly more lenient with the extreme right. In line with Hallin and Mancini's theory of polarized political news environments in countries like Spain, our results show that this polarization is characterized by a strong—but not always explicit—dominance of right-wing views.

The mainstream discussion regarding climate change in politics, public opinion and the media has focused almost exclusively on preventing the harms humans suffer due to global warming. Yet climate change is already having an impact on free-living nonhumans, which raises unexplored ethical concerns from a nondiscriminatory point of view. This paper discusses the inherent ethical challenge of climate change impacts on nonhuman animals living in nature and argues that the media and communication ethics cannot avoid addressing the issue. The paper further argues that media ethics needs to mirror animal ethics by rejecting moral anthropocentrism.

The entire span of animal research from captivity to death causes immense suffering for hundreds of millions of nonhuman animals every year. Their suffering also disturbs the public, which is increasingly aware—due to animal advocacy, scientists' testaments, and growing direct evidence—that animals' use in biomedical research is more a matter of tradition than any proven superiority of vivisection over other modes of experimentation. Yet in response, the vivisection industrial complex lobbies against animal welfare regulation and animal rights activism. This article discusses how the political economy of the vivisection industry supports the speciesist business of animal testing by mimicking the language of animal welfare to increasingly obstruct the public's compassion.

Although communications research in Spain produces a voluminous output and shows a great dynamism through a vast number of conferences and symposia, publications, books and articles, and doctoral dissertations, does this vast quantity show the same richness in terms of quality and diversity? In order to answer this question, and starting from the hypothesis that certain critical perspectives, mainly the political economy one, are deeply in the minority in the communications research field, the authors of this paper have carried out a study on the scholarly communications research presented or published in Spain during 2006. This paper presents the major results of it.

Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- List of Contributors -- Introduction -- 1 Beyond the Western Paradigm: Indigenization of Education Systems, the Sustainable Development Goals and State Building in Sub-Saharan Africa -- 2 Indigenous Knowledges, Education and Media in Australia -- 3 Forest Rights Act, Local Collectivisation and Transformation in Korchi -- 4 Food System Transition in India: A Political Ecology Analysis -- 5 The Political Ecology of the Tabasará River Basin -- 6 Indigenous Ecological Knowledge in the Colombian Amazon - Challenges and Prospects for a More Sustainable use of Local Forest Fauna -- 7 A Dialogue of Knowledges - What can we Bring Home from the Plurivers? -- 8 Indigenous Good Sense on Climate Change -- 9 Indigenous Knowledges and Academic Understandings of Pastoral Mobility -- 10 Struggling With 'Clear Zoning': Dilemmas of Carnivore-Pastoral Coexistence in Nordland, Northern Norway -- 11 Through Our Stories we Resist: Decolonial Perspectives on South Saami History, Indigeneity and Rights -- Index.

In this paper we argue that adopting critical animal studies perspectives in critical public relations can not only be very fruitful, but that it is also a necessity if the aims of the latter are to be achieved. To this end, this text introduces the challenges and opportunities that the field of critical animal studies brings to critical public relations studies. First, a short explanation of what critical animal studies is and why it can contribute to critical public relations studies is provided. Then the main fields of research where this contribution can be most relevant are discussed, including ethics, discourse studies and political economy. The final aim of this theoretical paper is to expand research within the field of critical public relations by including a critical animal studies approach. Eventually, the authors suggest that embracing the animal standpoint in critical public relations is an essential step to furthering the study of power, hegemony, ideology, propaganda or social change and to accomplishing the emancipatory role of research.

El cambio climático ha sido objeto de estudio frecuente desde distintos ámbitos de las ciencias sociales en las últimas décadas, también desde la comunicación. Gracias a ello, se ha generado una cada vez más abundante evidencia de la realidad compleja que se esconde tras la inacción política al respecto. Sin embargo, a la hora de comunicar esta realidad, los medios de comunicación, y una parte de la academia, han tendido a simplificar esta complejidad poniendo el foco en el contramovimiento climático y el negacionismo literal del fenómeno. Este contramovimiento ha sido abundantemente estudiado en los Estados Unidos, lo que ha puesto en evidencia la existencia de un negacionismo del cambio climático antropogénico muy influyente en ese país. Pero la investigación académica ha hecho también evidente que la inacción política al respecto del clima no puede explicarse solo con el concepto de negacionismo; ni en los Estados Unidos, ni mucho menos en Europa. En este artículo problematizamos el uso del concepto negacionismo en su uso indiscriminado actual y sugerimos incorporar un marco conceptual y de análisis más sofisticado, que aporte más matices y se alinee con las evidencias de la investigación académica. Se trata no solo de comunicar de forma crítica la realidad de la inacción política con respecto al clima sino de hacerlo también identificando todo el espectro real de responsabilidades, que no se reducen a negar o no negar el cambio climático. ; Climate change has been the subject of much research in various fields of the social sciences in recent decades, including that of communication. As a result, much evidence has been accumulated on the complex reality behind political inaction in this regard. However, when it comes to communicating this reality, the media, and part of academia, have tended to simplify this complexity by focusing on the climate countermovement and literal denialism of the phenomenon. This countermovement has been extensively studied in the United States, revealing the existence of a highly influential anthropogenic climate change denialism in that country. However, academic research has also shown that political inaction on the climate cannot be explained by denialism alone; not in the United States, and much less in Europe. In this article, we question the current indiscriminate use of the concept of denialism and suggest the incorporation of a more sophisticated conceptual and analytical framework that provides more nuance and aligns with the evidence emerging from academic research. It is a matter not only of critically communicating the reality of political inaction with regard to the climate, but also of identifying the entire spectrum of responsibilities, which are not limited to simply denying or not denying climate change.

Ideology and political ideologies in general have been addressed both from theoretical and applied perspectives by media and communication scholars in an attempt to reveal whether pluralism is present or absent in the media. However, the complexity of such a task has proven to be high as well as very problematic. The efforts to systematise the study of ideology in the media in order to make it objective and systematic have been scarce. This paper tries to contribute to such systematising by providing a method to analyse political ideologies in the media that aims to be objective and replicable in the political context of Western democracies. Our work was inspired by previous studies that were mostly conducted in the field of political sciences and political communication. The main goal of this paper is to reach a deeper comprehension of ideology, in general, and political ideology in particular, and to conceptualise a method that aims to be instrumental in the analysis of the media from the viewpoint of political ideologies but without being restricted by traditional labels that may reproduce cultural biases. The theoretical-analytical method here suggested addresses ideologies in newspapers to identify worldviews according to four general values: individualism, communitarianism, egalitarianism and elitism.

In recent times, no subject matter has provoked stronger practical science wars than the question of climate change, its human causes, and its policy implications. This chapter addresses this conflict constellation, as an extreme case, to highlight its particular relevance to policy-related think tanks and think tank networks. These are the core subject of this chapter, along with the rise of transnational expert, consulting, and lobby/advocacy agencies that appear increasingly to rely on a growing number (or "a new breed") of partisan and contract think tanks employed strategically to achieve political ends. Since the political character of knowledge has to be considered a normal rather than an extraordinary feature of policy-related knowledge, the expertise-interest nexus and the expertise-lobbying feature are relevant way beyond the arguably extreme case of climate change. Yet think tank studies so far have not been sufficiently directed to meet the challenges posed by this new type of transnational political technocracy. Think tank network studies are introduced here as a promising way to improve understanding of the knowledge-interest nexus in transnational knowledge regimes.

This article analyzes the inputs and constituencies (funding, founders, trustees, and experts) of the most influential group of think tanks in Spain during the great recession (2008-2015) in order to assess how far these think tanks were connected to other interest groups providing support for neoliberal policies. The aim of the article is to advance knowledge on think tank theory and it addresses three research goals: (a) assessing how far Spanish think tanks are affected by political clientelism and financialization, (b) identifying those actors who direct Spanish think tanks and collaborate with them, and (c) assessing the think tanks' connections with international lobbying networks. Our results show that the think tanks studied are consistently related to three types of actor—political, economic, and academic—while also maintaining strong ties with the media. In this regard, their main traits are a pluralism biased toward right and center-left stances, state and party clientelism, the financial and political instrumentalization of party tanks, and the superior ability of conservative tanks to build network coalitions.

This study examines the ideological slant of Spanish digital-native opinion journalism. Political-ideological pluralism is a well-researched topic in media and journalism studies, yet there is less research regarding this topic when it comes to exclusively online media. This paper addresses that gap concerning the ways online-only opinion journalism can be defined in terms of their political ideology, and to what extent extreme ideological positions are represented in online journalism. Evidence from a content analysis of opinion columns appearing in the most widely-read Spanish online newspapers, during the month of May 2011 shows a general anti-left bias in the opinion sections of the newspapers, as well as a representation of the political extremes that is slightly more lenient with the extreme right. In line with Hallin and Mancini's theory of polarized political news environments in countries like Spain, our results show that this polarization is characterized by a strong—but not always explicit—dominance of right-wing views.