M - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

epresentations in the news media. The seminal nature
of news forms, the modalities of news story telling and
the appeals and conventions, inscribed in the public
representation and elaboration of news, for instance,
have been recognised as important in a pertinent study
of different forms of television news and how these
variously shape environmental portrayal (Cottle 1993b).
Cottle’s study suggests that popular and serious
orientated news programmes provide markedly different
news treatments of these issues and that it is those with
a popular news focus that carry a great quantity. The
rest of this paper in examining the children’s news
programme will offer further evidence of the importance
of the news form within this process. Outlined here will
be the particularised aims and practices that literally
produce this news form and the character of its
environmental representations.
Greening the Newsround agenda
Above it has been suggested that news professionals’
shape their news agenda on the basis of a shared view of
their programme form rather than as a response to the
standardized news production values, beats and routines,
for instance. This is confirmed by my study of the
production of BBC Newsround (2) which reveals how a
search for stories appropriate for children characterises
the process as well as how assumptions about the age
and interests of children underpin news professionals’
everyday practices to shape such stories (see Matthews
2003). As is explained in the comment that follows,
environmental news is selected on this basis:
There’s no hidden agenda. We are not sort
of Greenpeace in disguise […] None of us
are maniacally environmentalist or even
vegetarian. […] we’re just doing it because
it’s what children are interested in it.
Newsround journalist 6
Rather then being sympathetic to the
environment or showing a preference for the issue, news
workers, this reveals, view children’s interest in
environmental matters as a motivation behind their
selection of such material. But, from where has this
assumption originated and moreover has this informed
the programme’s coverage in a uniform way over time?
A good place to start to answer these questions is to
visit the time when the programme was being developed
in the early 1970s.
Establishing the environment: linking kids with
nature
To understand the formation of present news workers’
views of environmental issues, we must examine how
these were introduced in the meetings held prior to the
first broadcast of the programme in 1972. Interviews
with past news workers have revealed much about this
time showing, for instance, how the news team turned
44
their attention to the environmental issue when
reviewing potential Newsround stories on the assumption
that this might reflect children’s general interest in
animals. After an initial discussion along these lines, it was
agreed that the habitat destruction issue in particular
would produce interesting news copy that perhaps
would create strong and desirable reactions from the
young viewers, as the presenter describes below:
We knew from the very start when we did
a story about saving the seals and the
whales that we would get vast numbers of
letters and petitions in from the audience.
Former Newsround presenter 1
Also recognized was how the traditional
straightforward reporting of news stories would be in this
instance an inadequate method to attract and maintain
the attention of a young audience to this issue. In
preference to a straightforward news-reporting style then
a news presentation was adopted that arranged themes
purposefully to evoke the emotions and interests of the
audience within a popular story format:
When they hear something is polluting and
that pollution has a knock-on effect, that it
kills fish or whatever, it gets kids thinking
that is wrong. So we had identified that this
was what kids were interested in and that
we could milk it. And that’s why we were
pushing it.
Newsround journalist 3
After first witnessing the success of this
coverage, the news team implemented the general
strategy in the news presentation of other emerging
issues in a bid to create a similar appeal. From this time
forward, such stories were packaged in such a way as to
grab the audience’s attention and emerged from the
production line reflecting:
The basic arguments about caring for the
planet and wanting to have a clean
environment ... these things, children latch
onto very, very easily.
Former Newsround journalist 3
During this heady time, moreover, the
presentation strategy, as a seemingly successful way to
create interest in these matters, allowed for the inclusion
of large-scale environmental issues within the children’s
news bulletin. For instance, between 1983 and 1993,
various stories were shaped by this technique including
those addressing nuclear disasters; overpopulation; acid
rain; the greenhouse effect; the ozone layer; the
contamination of beef; green lifestyles and technologies;
the international trade in exotic animals; and worldwide
environmental days and earth summits. The newly
emerging global environmental story was presented in a
similar fashion to the wildlife story before it. However,