ABSTRACT

In the previous chapter, I discussed mass mediated representations of nature, taking the example of how climate change science has been reported in ‘quality’ newspapers. I ended with some brief observations about the need for newspaper regulation designed to serve the ‘public interest’. There’s a lot more I could say about press regulation – it’s a manifestly important topic. 1 In this final chapter, however, I want to focus on the governance of science. If the news media, and the mass media more generally, is a crucial passage-point for non-media representations of nature, then science remains the largest producer of these non-media representations. It’s at the heart of a wider phenomenon we call ‘expert knowledge’. More than the words and images of poets and advertisers (say), we tend in the long run to pay far greater attention to what scientists tell us about the world (as do political decision-makers). They speak to us in a range of specialised idioms and produce cognitive knowledge in the main, though with important implications for our ethical (and aesthetic) practices. While scientists’ claims typically come to us courtesy of news and current affairs outlets (as the previous chapter indicated), the way scientists manage their activities is every bit as important for us as the way news industry regulation is undertaken.