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This chapter places the concept of sustainability in the context of recent discussions about the environment, particularly climate change, as a 'post-political' issue. For many years it was taken for granted that the aim of environmental campaigning was to build consensus (in terms of both scientific understanding and policy responses), but by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century some critics had started to argue that this approach was mistaken. The attempt to put the issue of climate change 'above' or 'beyond' politics began to look strangely self-defeating. Instead of producing decisive action and political engagement, the consensus-building strategy had resulted in a closing down of democratic debate and in political demobilisation (Machin 2013: 5). Although this problem was often seen in terms of particular communications strategies and campaigning approaches to the specific issue of climate change, it was also usually understood in the context of broader developments – as the 'emblematic case' of a more general post-political malaise (Swyngedouw 2013: 3). The mainstreaming and de-politicisation of climate change could be seen both as symptomatic of, and as reinforcing or even helping to cause, a more general hollowing out of politics and public life since the 1990s.

For many years, the objective of environmental campaigners was to push climate change on to the agenda of political leaders and to encourage media attention to the issue. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, it appeared that their efforts had been spectacularly successful. Yet just at the moment when the campaigners' goals were being achieved, it seemed that the idea of getting the issue into mainstream discussion had been mistaken all along; that the consensus-building approach produced little or no meaningful action. That is the problem of climate change as a 'post-political' issue, which is the subject of this book. Examining how climate change is communicated in politics, news media and celebrity culture, Climate Change and Post-Political Communication explores how the issue has been taken up by elites as potentially offering a sense of purpose or mission in the absence of political visions of the future, and considers the ways in which it provides a focus for much broader anxieties about a loss of modernist political agency and meaning. Drawing on a wide range of literature and case studies, and taking a critical and contextual approach to the analysis of climate change communication, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of environmental studies, communication studies, and media and film studies.

This chapter reviews the key claims of the long tradition of critical scholarship analysing the role of the media in Western democracies, and assesses how far this radical tradition remains useful for understanding news coverage of contemporary conflicts.

Despite claims of continuity, contemporary data journalism is quite different from the earlier tradition of computer-assisted reporting. Though it echoes earlier claims about being scientific and democratic, these qualities are understood as resulting from better data access rather than as being something achieved by the journalist. In the context of Big Data in particular, human subjectivity tends to be downgraded in importance, even understood as getting in the way if it means hubristically theorising about causation rather than working with correlation and allowing the data to speak. Increasing 'datafication' is not what is driving changes in the profession, however. Rather, the impact of Big Data tends to be understood in ways that are consonant with pre-existing expectations, which are shaped by the broader contemporary post- humanist political context. The same is true in academic analysis, where actor- network theory seems to be emerging as the dominant paradigm for understanding data journalism, but in largely uncritical ways.

Since the end of the Cold War there have been many competing ideas about how to explain contemporary conflicts, and about how the West should respond to them. This study, newly available in paperback, examines how the media interpret conflicts and international interventions, testing the sometimes contradictory claims that have been made about recent coverage of war. Framing post-Cold War conflicts takes a comparative approach, examining UK press coverage across six different crises. Through detailed analysis of news content, it seeks to identify the dominant themes in explaining the post-Cold War international order, and to discover how far the patterns established prior to 11 September 2001 have subsequently changed. Based on extensive original research, the book includes case studies of two 'humanitarian military interventions' (in Somalia and Kosovo), two instances where Western governments were condemned for not intervening enough (Bosnia and Rwanda), and the post-9/11 interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Media, War and Postmodernity investigates how conflict and international intervention have changed since the end of the Cold War, asking why Western military operations are now conducted as high-tech media spectacles, apparently more important for their propaganda value than for any strategic aims. Discussing the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s and the War on Terror, the book analyzes the rise of a postmodern sensibility in domestic and international politics, and explores how the projection of power abroad is undermined by a lack of cohesion and purpose at home. Drawing together debates from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, Philip Hammond argues that contemporary warfare may be understood as 'postmodern' in that it is driven by the collapse of grand narratives in Western societies and constitutes an attempt to recapture a sense of purpose and meaning.

As the world of politics and public affairs has gradually changed beyond recognition over the past two decades, journalism too has been transformed. yet the study of news and journalism often seems stuck with ideas and debates which have lost much of their critical purchase. Journalism is at a crossroads: it needs to reaffirm core values and rediscover key activities, almost certainly in new forms, or it risks losing its distinctive character as well as its commercial basis. Journalism Studies is a polemical textbook that rethinks the field of journalism studies for the contemporary era. Organised around three central themes – ownership, objectivity and the public – Journalism Studies addresses the contexts in which journalism is produced, practised and disseminated. It outlines key issues and debates, reviewing established lines of critique in relation to the state of contemporary journalism, then offering alternative ways of approaching these issues, seeking to reconceptualise them in order to suggest an agenda for change and development in both journalism studies and journalism itself. Journalism Studies is a concise and accessible introduction to contemporary journalism studies, and will be highly useful to undergraduate and postgraduate students on a range of Journalism, Media and Communications courses.

It is well-known that modelers & policy analysts gain access to policy-making arenas based on what they know. Therefore, critics of models are quick to employ various types of technical standards when evaluating policy models in order to asses validity & reliability of claims to knowledge. It is argued that, in the effort to make models better, overreliance on technical standards misses the important political & policy reasons to model: models call attention to the modelers & to their advice about important policy problems of the day. In this sense, models are used as symbols, as claims to authority, whether or not the underlying knowledge is technically up to snuff. Drawing on the experience of energy policy models, the problem of models as knowledge vs as symbols is explored & the muddle that conflicts between them produce is examined. 53 References. Modified HA.

This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from games studies, media and cultural studies, politics and international relations, and related fields to examine the complex relationships between military-themed videogames and real .