ABSTRACT
In Thailand, the journalistic values of newsworthiness and timeliness tend to situate climate change issues, in both national and local news, within a global agenda. Episodic news and dependency on established sources, enhance the influence of powerful international and national institutions in climate change news discourses. This supports official government claims and environmental and natural resources management policies. Climate change issues are thus framed within global and national time but divorced from the local environmental problems of the present. This chapter adopts a political-economy of journalism viewpoint anchored by the concept of “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011), which indicates that timeliness and newsworthiness limit the voice of “the poor” in environmental debates. Related to this, powerful claims-makers employ Western environmental ideologies to secure climate change discourses in the news in ways that further an “ecological neo-imperialism” (Beck, 1999). Climate change mitigation is represented as a priority in Thai environmental policy with a focus on being good global citizens, while local climate change adaptations earn less attention from the news media. This chapter argues that capitalistic development discourse also shapes the structure of Thai news organizations. This, in turn, results in the neglect of more nuanced and localized environmental journalism in Thailand.
