The new era of NGO campaigning

The implication here is that the urgency that members of an environmental NGO may feel for their own particular issue may be not shared by most other people in other epistemic communities.

In the example of environmental NGO campaigns, most people in western countries would probably feel that everyday life is actually getting better and that there is not much of an environmental problem. They do not share the fears of environmental NGOs which may be worried about, for example, climate change. Indeed, I grew up in post-war London - the evil, thick fogs of my childhood have long since gone and the Thames is cleaner now than when I was a child. I happen to share the concerns of environmental NGOs but I can also see how a person in my situation could easily claim that life is getting better and better compared with what they would have known in their childhood.

The risk is that environmental campaigners speak only to their own fellow members (in their own epistemic community) and so they don’t reach a wider audience.

From “leaders” to “followers”

Traditionally “leaders” would stake out their point of view and invite potential followers to get behind them. For example Winston Churchill in the 1930s warned the British about the German menace and he was ignored. But then in 1939-1940 suddenly the British turned to him for leadership and he became Prime Minister in May 1940.

Now we have “followers”: leaders wait to see where the crowd is running and then run in front of the crowd and claim that they have always had that point of view. They will often replay back to the crowd the fears of that crowd. As the crowd changes its mind, so the “leaders” will change theirs.

A standard example of this process is the “war on terror”. The risk of being killed by terrorists in western countries has been greatly exaggerated (the average American stands a far higher chance of being killed through food poisoning). But thanks to the saturation media coverage, there is a perception among the public that there is a high risk of dying in a terrorist attack and so the politicians heed that fear by replaying the fears back to the voters and have introduced overly elaborate security measures.

The Washington DC-based German journalist Gabor Steingart (Gabor Steingart, The War for Wealth: The True Story of Globalization, Or Why the Flat World is Broken, Sydney: McGraw-Hill, 2008 has even warned that the “war on terror” is a diversion from the real threats to the US. “… our fears have been spun out of proportion. The Taliban consists of military dwarves and political pygmies. A country like Iran, with the gross domestic product the size of Connecticut’s and a military budget only as  big as Sweden’s, doesn’t deserve the attention of the entire American public and its government”. The real issue is not so much terrorism as the comparative decline of the US economy and the rise of the Asian powers such as China.

If the leaders perceive that the environment (or any other issue) as not being of any real interest to the voters, then they won’t give leadership on it.

Rise of “info-tainment”

A fifth change has reflected the growing comfort of media consumers. Life is a great deal easier now for most people in all western countries. The appalling poverty and violence that marred their lives has been reduced; even a black man can become of President of the United States (which would have been unthinkable, say, in 1970 only 40 years ago).

This progress has led to changes in the media. In the 1930s, 1940s and then the Cold War (1945-91) the news could kill you. The Great Depression of the 1930s; followed in the early 1940s by the possible invasion by German, Italian or Japanese dictators (depending on where one lived); and then after World War II the threat of nuclear war were all, so to speak, “bad news”.

Now the news is not nearly so “bad”. There has been, for example, a reduction in international conventional warfare. The most dangerous period to have lived in the past 110 years was 1900-50; since then the number of wars and the number of people killed in them have both declined. Terrorism, as noted above, is not a major cause of death in the western world. The “bad” news is in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere all outside the western world - and those areas hardly rate a mention (unless western tourists accidentally get caught up in the foreign violence).

Therefore, we have moved from serious media reporting and discussion of “big issues” and “bad news”, to entertainment items such “lifestyle”, sport (Keith Suter “The Importance of Sport in Society” The Contemporary Review (Oxford), Autumn 2009) and cooking food. The news is a mixture of light information and entertainment: “info-tainment”.