Download Free Environmental Risk And The Press Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Environmental Risk And The Press and write the review.

Environmental Risks and the Media explores the ways in which environmental risks, threats and hazards are represented, transformed and contested by the media. At a time when popular conceptions of the environment as a stable, natural world with which humanity interferes are being increasingly contested, the medias methods of encouraging audiences to think about environmental risks - from the BSE or 'mad cow' crisis to global climate change - are becoming more and more controversial. Examining large-scale disasters, as well as 'everyday' hazards, the contributors consider the tensions between entertainment and information in media coverage of the environment. How do the media frame 'expert', 'counter-expert' and 'lay public' definitions of environmental risk? What role do environmental pressure groups like Greenpeace or 'eco-warriors' and 'green guerrillas' play in shaping what gets covered and how? Does the media emphasis on spectacular events at the expense of issue-sensitive reporting exacerbate the public tendency to overestimate sudden and violent risks and underestimate chronic long-term ones?
Toxic spills, acid rain, poor air quality-scarcely a day goes by without a report in the press on an environmental risk issue. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in New Jersey, a leading state in the production of chemicals, and the state with the largest number of Superfund cleanup sites. How accurate and how extensive is environmental risk reporting in the New Jersey press, and what can be done to improve the quality of its coverage of environmental risk? And what can we learn from the New Jersey experience?Environmental Risk and the Press sets out to answer these questions. The authors explore the strengths and weaknesses of environmental risk reporting in New Jersey by evaluating the state's best environmental risk stories. They find that even the best stories have a number of problems, and they develop a number of concrete recommendations for reporters and editors on how to improve their coverage in this area.The authors also investigate the feasibility of various methods for getting environmental risk information to reporters and into their newspapers. They recommend three ways to improve the quality of environmental risk information available to journalists. The first is nationwide distribution of environmental press kits that include a directory of news sources, a glossary of technical terms, and briefings by experts on strategies for covering particular types of environmental risk situations. The second is continuing education programs on environmental risk for reporters and editors. The third is creating collections of relevant reference books in the offices of newspapers and broadcast stations. The authors report on initial actions taken to implement these recommendations, and plans for others. They conclude that the broader availability of environmental risk information to the media will result in better reporting of environmental problems. This book is a first step toward enhancing journalists' appreciation of the importance of risk as an issue in environmental news coverage, and providing them with the tools to help them act upon that heightened awareness.
This collection calls for improved technical communication for the public through an embodied, situated understanding of environmental risk that promotes social justice. In addition to providing a series of chapters about recent issues on risk communication, this volume offers a diverse look at methodological practices for students, researchers, and practitioners looking to address embodied aspects of crisis and risk that incorporate UX, storytelling, and dynamic text. It includes chapters that bring embodiment to the forefront of risk communication, highlighting the cycle of content creation, dissemination, public response and decision making, continuing iterations of educational efforts, and recovery, toward increasing adaptive capacity as a whole. In addition, this work directs necessary attention to overcoming perceptual difficulties, memory lapses, definitional differences, access issues, and pedagogical problems in the communication of risks to diverse publics. This collection is essential reading for scholars and can be used as a supplemental text or casebook for courses in technical communication, environmental communication, risk and crisis communication, science communication, and public health.
Novels, films, theater, poetry, visual art, websites, news reports, and essays give context to environmental risk
A public meeting with angry residents and eager reporters is a common feature on the local news. Whether addressing environmental, or other issues, the experience for the board members, consultants, and specialists at these meetings ranges from uncomfortable to nightmarish. The issues discussed in these meetings usually stem from years of community disappointment, mistrust, fears, factions, political or social positioning, or all of the above. Industry faces a labyrinth of environmental and business regulations, and unique challenges in dealing with the public and the media. Environmental Risk Communication serves as a guide to understanding and complying with the Federal Risk Management Program and applying risk management and communication principles to daily plant operations. This book also helps Risk Management Plan (RMP) facilities successfully meet the new Federal requirements for public disclosure of RMP offsite consequence analysis results and provides techniques for communicating effectively during environmental emergencies. Written in a straight-forward, no-nonsense style the book presents concise informative chapters, flow diagrams, checklists, and a thorough index. The authors present step-by-step instruction on developing a principled plan of action that generates open communications. CEOs, Corporate Communications Specialists, Plant Managers, Environmental Compliance Supervisors, Health and Safety Officers, Environmental Scientists and Engineers, and Consultants will benefit from Environmental Risk Communication.
Annotation "This volume is recommended for practitioners in private emergency management and federal, state, and local governments, as well as students studying risk communication, health communication, emergency management, and environmental policy and management."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
The Politics of Precaution examines the politics of consumer and environmental risk regulation in the United States and Europe over the last five decades, explaining why America and Europe have often regulated a wide range of similar risks differently. It finds that between 1960 and 1990, American health, safety, and environmental regulations were more stringent, risk averse, comprehensive, and innovative than those adopted in Europe. But since around 1990, the book shows, global regulatory leadership has shifted to Europe. What explains this striking reversal? David Vogel takes an in-depth, comparative look at European and American policies toward a range of consumer and environmental risks, including vehicle air pollution, ozone depletion, climate change, beef and milk hormones, genetically modified agriculture, antibiotics in animal feed, pesticides, cosmetic safety, and hazardous substances in electronic products. He traces how concerns over such risks--and pressure on political leaders to do something about them--have risen among the European public but declined among Americans. Vogel explores how policymakers in Europe have grown supportive of more stringent regulations while those in the United States have become sharply polarized along partisan lines. And as European policymakers have grown more willing to regulate risks on precautionary grounds, increasingly skeptical American policymakers have called for higher levels of scientific certainty before imposing additional regulatory controls on business.
How the US Environmental Protection Agency designed the governance of risk and forged its legitimacy over the course of four decades. The US Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 to protect the public health and environment, administering and enforcing a range of statutes and programs. Over four decades, the EPA has been a risk bureaucracy, formalizing many of the methods of the scientific governance of risk, from quantitative risk assessment to risk ranking. Demortain traces the creation of these methods for the governance of risk, the controversies to which they responded, and the controversies that they aroused in turn. He discusses the professional networks in which they were conceived; how they were used; and how they served to legitimize the EPA. Demortain argues that the EPA is structurally embedded in controversy, resulting in constant reevaluation of its credibility and fueling the evolution of the knowledge and technologies it uses to produce decisions and to create a legitimate image of how and why it acts on the environment. He describes the emergence and institutionalization of the risk assessment–risk management framework codified in the National Research Council's Red Book, and its subsequent unraveling as the agency's mission evolved toward environmental justice, ecological restoration, and sustainability, and as controversies over determining risk gained vigor in the 1990s. Through its rise and fall at the EPA, risk decision-making enshrines the science of a bureaucracy that learns how to make credible decisions and to reform itself, amid constant conflicts about the environment, risk, and its own legitimacy.
We see the stories in the newspaper nearly every day: a drug hailed as a breakthrough treatment turns out to cause harmful side effects; controls implemented to reduce air pollution are shown to generate hazardous solid waste; bans on dangerous chemicals result in the introduction of even more risky substitutes. Could our efforts to protect our health and the environment actually be making things worse? In Risk versus Risk, John D. Graham, Jonathan Baert Wiener, and their colleagues at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis marshal an impressive set of case studies which demonstrate that all too often our nation's campaign to reduce risks to our health and the environment is at war with itself.
Toxic spills, acid rain, poor air quality-scarcely a day goes by without a report in the press on an environmental risk issue. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in New Jersey, a leading state in the production of chemicals, and the state with the largest number of Superfund cleanup sites. How accurate and how extensive is environmental risk reporting in the New Jersey press, and what can be done to improve the quality of its coverage of environmental risk? And what can we learn from the New Jersey experience?Environmental Risk and the Press sets out to answer these questions. The authors explore the strengths and weaknesses of environmental risk reporting in New Jersey by evaluating the state's best environmental risk stories. They find that even the best stories have a number of problems, and they develop a number of concrete recommendations for reporters and editors on how to improve their coverage in this area.The authors also investigate the feasibility of various methods for getting environmental risk information to reporters and into their newspapers. They recommend three ways to improve the quality of environmental risk information available to journalists. The first is nationwide distribution of environmental press kits that include a directory of news sources, a glossary of technical terms, and briefings by experts on strategies for covering particular types of environmental risk situations. The second is continuing education programs on environmental risk for reporters and editors. The third is creating collections of relevant reference books in the offices of newspapers and broadcast stations. The authors report on initial actions taken to implement these recommendations, and plans for others. They conclude that the broader availability of environmental risk information to the media will result in better reporting of environmental problems. This book is a first step toward enhancing journalists' appreciation of the importance of risk as an issue in environmental news coverage, and providing them with the tools to help them act upon that heightened awareness.