Reporting with Care: Reflections on Environmental Journalism, Ethics, and Latin American Challenges

ABSTRACT

In this article, I delve into the intersection of care and environmental journalism within the context of Latin American challenges. Drawing on personal experiences as an academic, I emphasize the imperative of an ethic of care to guide scholarly endeavors in overcoming systemic barriers in the region. Reflecting on collaborative research and personal experiences, I discuss the urgent need for evidence-based decision-making in vulnerable areas. Navigating the complexities of journalistic principles amid environmental crises, I advocate for care as a crucial news value. I urge fellow academics to contribute to transformative journalism and scholarship, fostering credibility and relevance while challenging oppressive systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Latin America
• environmental journalism
• ethic of care
• journalistic ethic
• SDG 10: Reduced inequalities

I started conceptualizing this article with the idea of discussing the concept of care in the context of Latin American journalism. Although I still largely touch on that topic, I also decided to change a bit the scope of this article to better reflect on the scholarly challenges I see in the region and how an ethic of care can provide some guiding principles in addressing those challenges. I also wanted to provide a personal and candid reflection of my experience as an academic, in a way that I do not usually in my published work as a researcher in/of environmental communication.

Getting here

A few months before the height of the global COVID pandemic, in December 2019, I spent some time in the city of Piura in northern Peru, my country of origin, collaborating with faculty and students in the school of communication at a state university. We were working on a study examining risk perceptions, news sources, and protective behaviors in the context of El Niño and extreme flooding. El Niño frequently devastates vulnerable communities in northern Peru, where limited prevention and infrastructure upgrades are put in place to protect marginalized communities (Echegaray et al., 2023). As a scholar of environmental journalism and news, I have collaborated with many colleagues in Latin America before, but this experience was different. My colleagues invited me to provide training in theory and research methods, research design, data analysis, among other aspects of scholarly inquiry. The need for evidence-based decision-making is immense in high-risk areas with vulnerable populations, and these academics were eager and committed to conduct the research needed to inform risk-mitigating actions. They also recognized their research limitations, which are not of their own doing. The barriers that prevent access to opportunities to develop research capacities in low and middle-income countries are chronic and systemic, rooted in a post-colonial legacy that is hard to overcome. Readers who work or are from these countries can surely relate to this.

As a Peruvian, I consider myself one of the few privileged and lucky ones who have succeed as an academic in the United States. I attended a British school in Lima, didn’t have to work to pay my way through college, and had a stable, supportive family. It took considerable efforts and sacrifices to get where I am today, but I recognize the privileges that allowed me to do so. Even with this in consideration, it is relatively easy to be an academic in the United States. I don’t mean to dismiss the precariousness of many who are adjuncts or who are facing challenges to academic freedom and job security in states like Texas or Florida today. What I mean is that for me, a tenured professor at an R1 (the US category for highest research productivity universities) in a well-resourced and prestigious college of communication in a (for now) blue (or democratic) state in the United States, I have relatively abundant academic freedom and resources to engage in the type of scholarship I want. Most academics around the world don’t have those opportunities.

However, I often question my scholarly contributions – there is always a bit of imposter syndrome¹ – and wonder if I am doing enough, which I see as a good motivator to strive for more. I live a comfortable life, although it was not always like that. As many academics, I was a relatively poor graduate student during my M.S. and Ph.D. studies with a family for whom I took care financially and emotionally. I can’t claim to understand all the challenges many less fortunate people face, but my experiences influence my perceptions of the type of scholarship I should engage with. I don’t consider myself an activist, or even a “pracademic,” as my former professor Sue Senecah referred to herself. I do engage in research and practice that I believe can have an impact, perhaps not directly and immediately, but in the longer term. Long-term vision/planning is a guiding principle in most things I do. And I follow many norms of journalism to do that work, which I outline below. Yet, I agree with Robert Cox (Takahashi, 2023; Takahashi et al., 2021) that environmental communication scholars have a moral duty to engage in research and practice that have the potential to positively affect people’s lives and people’s relationship to place. We are not only distant/detached observers.

With this background in mind, I would like to take the opportunity of this Special Issue on Care to reflect on what I care about culturally, as well as how care surfaces in my research in journalism. Care in both instances is a motivation for the work I do in environmental communication, one I tend not to foreground.

What do I care about?

As someone from the region, I care about Latin America and its people. It is a region in constant state of crisis. I have visited some but not all countries in this vast region. I have met many wonderful people from most countries. It is probably because of the language – Spanish primarily although I am learning Portuguese – or food, or shared cultural references like Chespirito. It might even be fútbol. Whatever the reasons, after almost two decades of living, studying, and working in the United States, my views on Latin America and its relation to the United States and other colonizing countries – particularly Spain and Portugal – have matured. This would not be remarkable, perhaps, except that Latin American voices remain marginalized in the United States (Takahashi, 2023).

How does this investment matter to my work? For one, I often teach an undergraduate seminar called International News and Government Dynamics. The class examines international news coverage in the United States about Latin America, as well as media systems in the region and their intertangled relation with the state (Waisbord, 2016). We examine journalism in countries such as Venezuela and Mexico, as well as the history of interventionism by the United States – for example Operación Condor and more recent neoliberal interventions in the name of progress, modernity, and development. We examine and criticize theoretical approaches such as modernization and dependency. I also have conducted many studies and have written about communication processes related to environmental discourses in the region, underscoring both the marginalization of these journalistic practices, as well as what we might learn from a more inclusive approach (e.g. Takahashi, 2023; Takahashi et al., 2015, 2018).

All these experiences have led to the realization of two things. First, regardless of all the empirical evidence and the theorizing about the environmental challenges that Latin Americans face vis-a-vis a peripheral standing in global affairs, things are much more complex than described, and there is so much we (academics) don’t know. Second, as much as I care about a vast region, there is only so much I can do to contribute to addressing existing challenges. This means I need to be strategic about where I can attempt to intervene. Below I consider these reasonings in relation to my own scholarship.

What does care mean in journalism?

Can care be an approach journalists and news organizations take to produce news content that is aligned with audiences’ needs and the magnitude of environmental problems plaguing Latin America? Initially, the answer appears simple: we already do.

The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) in the United States, as well as most democratic societies around the world, established four principles journalists should abide by to fulfill their role of public enlightenment in a democratic society: (1) seek the truth and report it; (2) minimize harm; (3) act independently; and (4) be accountable and transparent. Care matters to these principles insofar as they ask journalists to care, reduce carelessness, and to take care to work and produce work for the greater societal good. These principles become further intertwined with care for environmental journalists as they also have to account for non-human species and the ecosystems that support them in their reporting. Balancing and accounting for societal needs – i.e. environmental justice, economic development – vis-a-vis environmental degradation requires journalists to be particularly attentive to a broad ethic of care in their reporting.

Although essential, however, these principles of environmental journalism often are haphazardly followed and fall short, considering the urgency posed by crises such as climate change. For instance, the concept of truth, or fact-based reporting, in journalism is no longer as straightforward as it was in the pre-internet era. Waisbord (2018) argues that truth is what happens to news, meaning that whatever truth a journalist thinks they are reporting, takes a different meaning, sometimes the opposite, once it becomes part of the online public sphere and passes through multiple filters that distort the original truth reported by the journalist. Untruthful discourses – for example fringe and conspiracy theories – were sidelined and relegated to the pages of sensationalist publications.

The stakes of this shift are high. Today some discourses that are not fact-based have become mainstream and manifest themselves in violent rhetoric and in physical violence in extremely polarized contexts. Xenophobic and racist representations of minoritized and marginalized groups in news coverage, whether in the context of immigration, the “war on drugs,” or other politicized issues such as climate change, reveals the challenges journalists face in seeking the truth. Parks (2022) highlights the complex relationship of journalists and audiences with the truth since the concept of truth is now largely polysemic – these meanings include the logical, empirical, affective, ideological, authoritarian, and narrative. Parks explains that journalists’ primary focus on seeking and amplifying empirical truths is justifiable, but ignoring or failing to recognize and integrate other types of truths expressed by information sources diminishes the effectiveness of those empirical truths, as journalists cannot simply ignore these other discourses. And, yet, how do we engage them while abiding by the second journalistic principles of minimizing harm?

Operating independently and with transparent accountability also becomes complicated in practice. Consider how many Latin American countries’ professional journalists’ associations have similar codes of ethics to that of SPJ. After all, media systems and news practices have been influenced by journalism practiced in the United States and western Europe. However, Latin American countries’ post-colonial history and legacy, one marred not in small part by US interventionism, largely explains the current captured liberal media systems that are found across the region (Guerrero, 2017). Operating within fragile democratic frameworks with weak institutional structures, regulations, and legal enforcement, Guerrero (2017, p. 124) explains that these media systems are characterized by having close ties between emerging political classes and traditional media elites, a historical shift toward clientelist relationships and informal dealings, and the adoption or rejection of neoliberal reforms from the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. Chile and Venezuela respectively). These systems result in limits to press freedom, harassment of journalists, and corruption. These are significant challenges and barriers to journalists who seek to report the truth and elevate the voices of marginalized populations or to incorporate new professional ethics in their work. These features also make these media systems susceptible to interference that could potentially lead environmental coverage to serve the interests of political and economic elites. For instance, in past work (Takahashi et al., 2018), we examined the limited criticism of international and hegemonic discourses in Latin American news, and how such omission in consequence affects the coverage of local impacts of global and regional problems such as climate change.

The threats and violence that journalists experience can serve as a deterrent or a catalyst for the adoption of an ethic of care. Violence against journalists and environmental activists aims to silence the voices that seek to inform and serve as watchdogs of governments and economic elites (Waisbord, 2000). Violence against journalists, particularly in Latin American countries, has increased substantially in recent years and significantly impacts the exercise of the profession, including those who report on environmental affairs (Reporters Without Borders, 2020). Jukofsky (2000) argued that early in the twenty-first century, environmental journalism in Latin America was going extinct. However, environmental journalism in the region today is growing and becoming more sophisticated, largely because of people who care.

A few weeks before writing this article, my colleague Eric Freedman (see, Freedman (2020) for more on his work in this area) and I were talking with a journalist who reports on illegal gold mining and the diesel mafias in the Peruvian Amazon. He shared the threats he has received for this reporting. He now wears a bullet-proof vest and a military grade helmet every time he leaves his home. His wife and kids, and colleagues have asked him to drop his reporting or move to a bigger city. He is not doing either because he cares. He cares for the place he calls home, the natural world, people who are impacted by these illegal activities, and about justice and the truth. If he stops, who will do it, he asked.

Journalism scholars have wrestled with an ethics of care in journalism (e.g. Pech & Leibel, 2006; Steiner & Okrusch, 2006), including one that has global appeal and applicability. However, codes of ethics are situational, as Jones (2021) and Hossain and Aucoin (2018) argue, so such an ethic would have to accommodate the characteristics of each unique media system. For instance, Venezuela’s press freedom ranks among the bottom in the world (159 out of 180 in 2023 according to Reporters Without Borders), while Costa Rica’s ranks 23 (it was 8 in 2022). The challenges need to be overcome, both within the profession as well as from state institutions. In the meantime, the challenges motivate journalists – particularly those in alternative media – to fill the information gap that mainstream news outlets have left either for lack of resources or state intervention.

There are other approaches that journalism scholars are exploring to reimage journalism considering the significant shortcomings exhibited in recent years. Parks (2021) has argued that traditional news values – conflict, deviance, human interest, timeliness, impact, prominence, and proximity – need to be reevaluated considering the current challenges of legitimacy that news organizations face. He has argued for the consideration of joy as a news value. This doesn’t mean to report on “good” news more frequently, but a reimagination of the practice of journalism, one that reorients “the minds of journalists and audiences toward affective characteristics of people and events that evoke well-being, delight, and courage” (Parks, 2021, p. 820). This bold ontological reorientation in journalism studies was cleverly adapted from the lessons provided by the global spiritual leaders Dalai Lama and Reverend Tutu in The Book of Joy (Lama et al., 2016). Parks (2021) argues that journalism should reorient itself to joyful dimensions that include perspective, humility, humor, acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude, compassion, and generosity.

These types of theoretical reasonings beg the question: How can journalists covering existential threats such as climate change, as well as disasters, toxic pollution, health impacts, species extinction, and many other environmental issues, and who work under precarious circumstances, apply care or joy as a news value in their reporting? And how might those of us who research journalism account for these ethics?

Consider, for example, Periodistas por el Planeta (Journalists for the Planet), a non-profit effort by independent journalists to report and promote a new narrative about socio-environmental crises in Latin America. They emphasize the urgent need for action to prevent the worst climate change-related impacts in the region. The initiative has the type of advocacy flavor that is frowned upon in journalism in the United States. It is also an example of what journalism of care could look like in Latin America and elsewhere.

There are many other independent efforts around the region such as Amazonia Latitude, Claves21, and Salud con Lupa, and mentoring and training-focused collaborations such as Climate Tracker América Latina, ConexiónCOP, LatinClima that serve as beacons for others interested in producing journalism that is relevant and that follow a different type of ethic or set of principles beyond objectivity. What’s still missing is more scholarly work that examines these efforts and provides empirical evidence that could be used to continue the transformation of journalism in Latin America – one that serves the needs of diverse audiences. That’s where us as an academic community need to unequivocally step in.

My own research is guided by my ethic of care. For example, I am working with an interdisciplinary team of Latin American colleagues examining scholarly contributions and indicators related to the intersection of climate change and public health in Latin America (Hartinger et al., 2023; Palmeiro-Silva et al., 2023; Takahashi et al., 2023). This work is part of the Lancet Countdown South America that seeks to provide empirical evidence to decision makers across the region. The goal is ultimately to influence the development of public policies that address current and future public health climate-related threats. This work involves not only research but engagement with diverse constituencies. Additionally, I have developed training efforts for environmental journalism in Latin America as part of the service mission of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University. These types of scholarship take resources, time, and considerable effort, and are often not rewarded in promotion or tenure decision, but it matters. Most of us do it because we care about impact.

An ethics of care would not necessarily require a complete abandonment of objectivity as a primary guiding principle used by journalists, but a thorough reconsideration of how other values could intersect with it (Sorhuet, 2013). Is journalism anchored in advocacy, transparency, solidarity, compassion, agape, and or care possible within a captured liberal media system? I argue that it is not only possible but a requirement to reshape journalism in Latin America and beyond in ways that it reestablishes itself as a credible, trustworthy, relevant, and necessary source of environmental information that confronts existing hegemonic power structures that continue to oppress and determine the fate of people and places.

Moving forward

I hope this discussion offers compelling examples to emerging scholars in the field who want to study voices and practices too often marginalized in environmental communication to date. While some or most of my efforts might have negligible impact on public policies, journalism practice, or the livelihoods of populations, I do try – if I’m being honest – to have an impact that matters. Many of the challenges that I have noted for journalists today are intractable and embedded in resilient and stubborn oppressive systems. I also recognize that the cumulative effect of many committed and caring people – journalists, activists, academics, among others – could have a transformative impact over time. This is all I need to keep doing the work I do.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The National Institutes of Health defines it as “a behavioral health phenomenon described as self-doubt of intellect, skills, or accomplishments among high-achieving individuals.”