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Resistance to Extinction Rebellion’s Press Protests Reveals Double Standards in the UK

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by Holly Barrow

Protestors block the entrance at Merseyside printing press (Image credit: Liverpool Echo)

On 5 September 2020, the global environmental movement, Extinction Rebellion, dominated headlines after blockading key printing sites in Merseyside and Hertfordshire, causing a significant disruption to the distribution of some of the UK’s leading national newspapers – including the Sun and The Times. Activists blocked exits to the print works, describing the protest as an attempt to hold these publications to account for their failure to report truthfully on the scale of the climate crisis and for ‘polluting national debate’ on a number of social issues, including migration.

Each of the newspapers affected by the blockade is owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who has been openly criticised on numerous occasions for his climate change denialism – not least due to his personal interests in the fossil fuel industry. By no coincidence, Murdoch’s newspapers have become renowned for being littered with rife climate skepticism, both across Australia and the UK.

Yet, despite the well-known murky ethics and questionable practices surrounding Murdoch’s publications, Extinction Rebellion’s protests were met with an onslaught of accusations by the likes of the Sun which claimed the organisation’s protests were ‘trying to destroy our greatest democratic principle: freedom of speech’. The Prime Minister himself echoed such sentiments via social media, suggesting that it is ‘completely unacceptable to seek to limit the public’s access to news in this way’ and that a free press is ‘vital’ in ‘holding the government and other powerful institutions to account.’

Only, this assertion neglects to acknowledge the inherent biases within the UK’s mainstream media and how it notably fails in its apparent duty to hold the powerful to account. The responses to Extinction Rebellion’s protests have revealed a deeply ingrained double standard regarding what is and is not considered ‘democratic’. In a recent article for the Guardian, George Monbiot wrote that Extinction Rebellion’s protests served to expose and fight against the ‘shallowness of our theatrical democracy’, and the ‘blatant capture of ours by the power of money’. It’s almost laughable, then, to witness those arguing that the movement’s protests threaten our way of life – that they attack the ‘freedom of the press’ that is considered so crucial to a functioning democracy – with zero irony. This glorified notion of the UK’s so-called ‘free press’ is a far cry from reality. As a matter of fact, it has long been in decline.

The increasing corporatisation of the media is what ought to be recognised as the real threat to press freedom. The UK’s leading newspapers are owned by a handful of billionaires and giant corporations. This drastically hinders the workings of an actual ‘free press’. From Murdoch to the Barclay brothers – 85-year-old British billionaire twins whose business empire spans from luxury hotels to budget retail – their deceitful dedication to protecting vested interests and setting political agendas through the UK’s leading publications has become well-established.

Former chief political commentator of the Telegraph, Peter Oborne, resigned from the paper after coming to recognise the unethical collusion between their editorial and commercial arms. The publication – owned by the aforementioned Barclay brothers – allegedly sought to bury criticisms against HSBC in 2013. In response, Oborne wrote in an article for OpenDemocracy: “HSBC, as one former Telegraph executive told me, is ‘the advertiser you literally cannot afford to offend.’” The media’s reliance on corporate advertising sees editors pandering to their whims.

What’s more, these billionaire-owners of the UK’s media and their publications are, unsurprisingly, right-leaning. The majority supported right-wing political parties in the 2019 general election, with a recent study by Loughborough University finding that the Labour Party was overwhelmingly targeted with negative coverage by national newspapers, while particular publications reserved positive stories almost exclusively for Johnson’s Conservative party. strong editorial support provided by the newspapers with the largest circulation (the Daily Mail and the Sun)

The political influence of the mainstream media is no new phenomenon. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair notoriously cosied-up to Murdoch in order to gain the backing of the Sun in the lead up to the 1997 general election – a move which many believe contributed to his landslide majority. In a recent BBC documentary on Murdoch’s media dynasty, former Sun deputy editor Neil Wallis told of how Murdoch played a crucial role in the paper’s drastic shift in support away from John Major’s Conservative party to Blair’s New Labour: “Rupert comes up and says ‘you’re getting this wrong. You’ve got this totally wrong. We are not just backing Tony Blair but we are going to back the Labour party and everything he does in this campaign 200%. You’ve got to get that right’.”

The relationship between Blair and Murdoch went on to be described as ‘incestuous’, with Murdoch’s decision to back him in 1997 allegedly arising as the two made a deal; Blair promised Murdoch he would not take the UK into the European currency without first having a referendum.

This relationship between media tycoons and leading politicians has been tirelessly scrutinised, with the 2012 Leveson inquiry revealing the extent of its impact, as editors admitted that Murdoch regularly interfered with content. Critics of Murdoch’s News Corp UK – which owns the Sun and The Times – have previously argued that ministers, chief constables, and regulators alike were unable to stand up to him due to the power of his company.

This enmeshing of media and commerce hardly screams the ‘pinnacle of democracy’ and press freedom. The insularity of the UK’s senior journalists only speaks further to a monolithic media – one which upholds the values, beliefs, and interests of a small section of society. A 2018 article by Jane Martinson described the UK media as ‘pale, male and posh’. Martinson – a British journalist and Professor of Financial Journalism at City University – broke down some extremely telling statistics regarding the background of some of the UK’s leading journalists: 51% are privately educated, as are 80% of editors. The journalism industry is 94% white with just 0.4% being Muslim. This inevitably plays a role in the way stories are reported, which stories are covered, and the interests of those reporting them.

Perhaps most embarrassingly, Johnson’s denouncement of Extinction Rebellion’s protests as a threat to Britain’s apparent free press is one riddled with hypocrisy. In December 2019, in the lead up to the general election, Johnson threatened to revoke Channel 4’s licence after they held a leaders’ debate on climate change – to which Johnson did not show. In his absence, Channel 4 placed a melting ice sculpture where Johnson would have stood; a symbol to mark the urgency of the crisis, with Johnson’s non-attendance speaking volumes. The Conservative party went on to launch a formal complaint with Ofcom, threatening to have Channel 4’s public broadcasting licence revoked.

Fast forward a few months and the Conservative government faced backlash again, this time for attempting to ban specific journalists – those most critical of the party – from attending a Downing Street briefing. Suffice to say, Johnson and the elite seem only to value the UK’s ‘free press’ when activists fight back against a heavily skewed media.

XR’s protests come at a time when the increased accessibility of social media helps to provide a necessary balance to the partisan traditional media. Twitter in particular has become key in challenging powerful political and social figures, succeeding where traditional media outlets often now fail. In July, Twitter fact-checked tweets made by Trump, after he incorrectly claimed that mail-in ballots would result in “a rigged election.” The platform then went on to flag any posts he had shared which included manipulated media.

The social media platform also caused a stir when it permanently banned the account of Katie Hopkins – notorious for espousing dangerous islamophobia and xenophobic rhetoric. Hopkins had previously been given a free pass to spout such views in the likes of the Sun. In refusing to provide a platform for such deeply hateful, divisive language, some – such as Trump – have denounced this as a form of censorship; a ‘policing of conservative voices’. However, this seems more like a balancing of power; no longer allowing for the dominant narrative to prevail unabated.

Holly Barrow is a features writer for the Immigration Advice Service – an organisation of OISC-accredited immigration lawyers providing assistance with Spouse Visas, British citizenship, and more

Why do so few Scholars Study the Intersection of Climate and Security?

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by Matthew Ader

Climate change or security, a question of the one or the other? (Image credit: Lisa Benson)

I have had two and a half hours of teaching on climate change and security in two years, and I am unlikely to get any more. BA and MA courses at the King’s Department of War Studies do not offer any modules about climate change. Neither do security studies courses at Exeter, St Andrews, Oxford, or Cambridge. The US has equally slim pickings. Where tuition does exist, it tends to focus on human security and development; not strategy and operations.

And yet climate change is reshaping the world in unpredictable ways. Multiple governments even named it as a major security threat. Academics correlate climate change, if a little tentatively, with increased rates of conflict. However, scholars of strategy and war do not seem to focus on it. I surveyed thirty-four International Relations and Security Studies journals – all those with an H-Index above 30. Since 1995, these journals have, between them, published 45 articles about the intersection of climate change and conflict. As a matter of contrast, just one of those journals, International Organization, published 4356 total articles in the same period.

This initial survey reveals a worrying gap in the literature. Security courses that rely on this research are the incubator for future policymakers and analysts, while academics are often called upon to advise governments. A failure to address climate change risks depriving the next generation of security leaders and thinkers of a solid grounding in an important subject. At best, this may leave governments scrambling to cope with unforeseen challenges. At worst, it could lead to the creation of bad policy – or even open the door for malign actors who take advantage of climate change to push other agendas.

Why has security academia not fully engaged in this subject? Partially, it is because academics are very busy and have many existing commitments. Undertaking novel research or designing new courses, especially when the literature is so sparse, is time-consuming. It is also risky; work on climate change may not be valued in the same way as more conventional topics when hunting for jobs. Worse still, there is little research funding in climate change and security. Ministries and Departments of Defence have declared climate change to be a threat but have yet to put their money where their mouth is. These challenges, combined with the broader structural precarity of academic careers, militate against researchers investigating climate change and security.

These generally applicable concerns are worsened by personnel policy. Security studies departments are not hiring climate change experts. For example, of the eighty academics in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, only two mention climate as a research interest. This makes cross-sectoral research more difficult. Even more concerning still is that such a deficit reduces opportunities for students interested in climate and security to study the issue. This, in turn, perpetuates the existing scarcity, creating a negative feedback loop. Of course, it would be unfair and inaccurate to blame this purely on hiring practices. A department cannot hire scholars who do not exist. However, it is at least partially a chicken-and-egg problem. The lack of cross-sectoral research and limited tuition opportunities addressing climate and security make it harder to attract additional academic talent to the field.

A related challenge is that climate change does not fit within traditional models of security analysis. It is not a human actor, it does not deploy discrete methods, and it is difficult to analyse through the conventional lenses of IR theory or grand strategy. Grappling with the climate requires scientific and geographical knowledge which falls outside the specialisms of most security scholars. For example, the fierce debate among geographers over the linkage between climate and conflict depends on comparing rainfall data against incidences of violence. Unless an academic is trained to a high level in meteorological modelling, they are unlikely to be able to engage with the discussion in depth. The one partial exception to this is the Human Security field. Human security, with its focus on different issues impacting ordinary people, has covered climate change in more detail. However, its perspective has more to do with development and local interventions than big-picture decision-making. While there are absolutely insights to be gained from that discipline for national policymakers, it does not answer the broader questions required to inform strategic decision-making.

Lastly, while we are seeing the impacts of climate change now, its most dramatic impacts lie in the future. Mass climate migration, unprecedented littoral urbanization, and irreversible water scarcity are not science fiction but their true implications are only just emerging. Scholars are understandably reticent to engage in speculation – it is risky and can lead to poor quality research. This is especially true for security studies and international politics, which are wildly unpredictable. As General McMaster noted, “we have a perfect record of predicting future wars…and that record is 0%.”

This is compounded by the creeping nature of climate change. On 12 September 2001, nearly every security scholar turned their attention to terrorism and the Middle East. I’m sure that a similar statistical analysis of journals from 1985 to 2000 would show relatively few articles about Salafi jihadism, but academics were able to apply their existing knowledge to the new problem. It is not clear that this will happen with climate change, because there will probably not be a single dramatic event which changes conversations and research priorities. Rather, it will incrementally alter global conditions over the span of decades, shaping a new normal.

Such a slow-moving emergency is unlikely to attract enough research to effectively inform policy – especially given that great power competition, terrorism, and biosecurity will, among other issues, remain pressing concerns throughout the period. This is worsened, as noted, by the requirement for expert scientific knowledge to properly study climate change. In short, there is unlikely to be a catalyst for the study of climate change, and if there is, security scholars may struggle to obtain the necessary scientific knowledge to properly engage with the issue in a timely fashion.

There is no single policy prescription that can magically fix this deficit. However, it is a problem – and it must be rectified. Climate change is actively reshaping the world. If security academics do not provide perspectives on it, the security implications may be ignored. Worse, they might be dishonestly weaponised to achieve a larger agenda. We have seen this already with alt-right groups using fear of climate migration as a recruiting tactic. The past four years have clearly shown that radical ideologies can find purchase at the highest levels of government. In the absence of informed views from authoritative sources, decisionmakers may turn to confident ideologues for answers.

At the end of that lecture on climate change, I asked the lecturer what the strategic plan was for dealing with the mass migrations, droughts, and water wars he predicted. He said that there was not a single one. The gap in the research is no one’s fault. But catastrophe does not care about intention. Policymakers will require effective advice to navigate the new challenges of this century. The academic community should mobilise to provide it – and security academics should lead the charge.

[1] This was achieved by searching their archives for all articles from 1995-2020 with “climate change” in the title and manually sorting through. This method is necessarily vulnerable to personal judgement and can exclude work on topics adjacent to climate change & security i.e. food scarcity.

Matthew Ader is a second-year student doing War Studies. He has worked as an intern in a number of security consultancy firms. His academic interests gravitate loosely towards understanding challenges and opportunities for Anglo-American strategy in the 21st century (and also being snide about Captain America’s command ability). He is also an editor for Roar News, and has written for a number of security publications – most especially Wavell Room. You can follow him on Twitter: @AderMatthew.