Beyond clickbait and commerce

Lyn McGaurr
They were a pain in the neck to work with because they wanted
assurances that they were going to see a spirit bear and I lied
and I said: Of course you’re going to see it – it’s very easy to
see. And they came and miraculously they saw the bear. And
they played it on international news in the United States. But we
also brought a movie team – a filmmaker team – Trip Jennings.
… So the filmmakers came and we raised the money for them
to produce Spoil. And so Spoil became the documentary that
was attached to the RAVE. And so it was not just the National
Geographic magazine. We had a press conference and we had
about 10 conservation partners in the US and Canada. We
wanted to blow the story as far and wide as we could. And we
did (Mittermeier, Cristina, personal communication, 8 July 2015).
Mittermeier’s faith in the mainstream media appeal of the spirit
bear was borne out by the six-minute Nightline video story, in which
journalist David Wright interviewed Mittermeier, McAllister and
Nicklen but also conducted his own quest for the animal, stressing
the isolation of the area by pointing out that there were no roads or
landing strips. In so doing, Wright’s encounter with the spirit bear
pre-empted Nicklen’s own success in photographing the animal,
suggesting a degree of competition may have contributed to ABC’s
decision to cover the RAVE. Importantly, ABC also gave Mittermeier
space to expound her thesis that conservation photography
makes a valid and important contribution to the public sphere:
‘Photography doesn’t require translation. It actually has a power to
captivate audiences. And we can convene important conversations
around these images’ (Mittermeier cited in Wright n.d.).
Of the 86 photographs from the RAVE that appear in a slideshow
on the iLCP’s website, only seven feature the spirit bear (iLCPb),
and these are by McAllister and Wendy Shattil. Mittermeier’s
photographs of First Nations’ people and their intimate connection
with the threatened waterways and land, share the screen(s)
with her RAVE collaborators’ photographs of other terrestrial and
marine life, protests against the pipeline, landscapes and aerial
views, as well as a shot of wolves by Robinson. In the context of the
hypermediacy of the iLCP website, with its brief textual explanations
of the problem and solution, this combination of images builds
an environmental narrative that is complex, comprehensible
and emotionally engaging. When a varied selection of the RAVE
photographs was reproduced on the Guardian’s website in
November 2010 in a long scroll accompanied by detailed captions
and links to the iLCP and Pacific Wild websites, the narrative of the
RAVE rather than the search for the spirit bear was the successful
hook that made space for the crucial story of the rainforest, the
First Nations and the Enbridge threat. In fact, no images of spirit
bears appeared in the Guardian feature.
26 Copyright 2016-2/3. Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. All rights reserved. Vol 13, No 2/3 2016