Local Crises, Global Catastrophes: Climate Catastrophe as "Elemental Media"

This chapter examines media narrative tropes that report on reoccurring catastrophes. We are interested in how the media operate to marshal or impede public opinion towards making political interventions. Global events and perspectives affect local disaster narratives, with catastrophes significantly impacting the public’s psyche. We channel the recent concept of “elemental media” (Peters, 2015) to argue for a step-change in how media is defined and studied. This perspective is a means of expanding the definition of media to serve the contemporary complex of communications processes more adequately in a time of permanent crisis. The chapter also inquires whether the impacts of climate catastrophes are mitigated by media or made worse and what prospects there are for future intervention in the consequences of further climate catastrophes. This chapter uses two examples of climate catastrophes: First, from 2019, Australia has experienced devastating fires (2019-20). These fires in the east of Australia were especially severe on the coast and ranges of New South Wales. The second example references the floods (2020-22) that devastated the interior of New South Wales Northern Rivers region and are currently threatening large parts of the state of Victoria. Our chapter contribution re-frames the global approaches to risk and catastrophe with the concept of elemental media because this idea of media embeds the existential threats posed by the climate crisis. It further suggests that the inflexion of local media narratives and tropes of the discursive interventions associated with news and current affairs reportage about catastrophe underpins the potency of this research.