The role of the media in staging air pollution: The controversy on extreme air pollution along Oxford Street and other debates on poor air quality in London

Abstract

Mapping the media frames that have both triggered and articulated the mobilisation around air pollution in London in the period 1997–2017, this paper shows how especially those events that have been framed in agonistic terms have led to a rise of media engagement with the topic. From the controversy around Sahara dust as a so-called ‘natural’ explanation for smog episodes, to the staging of Oxford Street as the most polluted street of the world, from Sadiq Khan's decision to join ClientEarth in its court case against the UK government to the debate on a new runway for Heathrow, from the Volkswagen scandal to the Black Lives Matter blockade of London City Airport: the discursive construction of us/them divides has been crucial in sparking passion, contestation and debate. Empirically, the paper starts from a detailed study of 1594 newspaper articles that appeared on air pollution in five British newspapers, The Guardian, Financial Times, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph and The Times, between January 1997 and March 2017. Theoretically, it combines Chantal Mouffe’s political theory with Anabela Carvalho’s media theory, in particular her diachronic model of circuits of culture. On this basis, the paper distinguishes five critical discourse periods and shows how a number of critical discourse moments, exactly because of their agonising dimension, have been able to spike media attention and shift the terms of the debate. Starting from this observation, the paper argues that media processes should not only be understood in cyclic terms, but can also trigger non-linear iterative dynamics, leading to upward spirals characterised by thresholds and a gradually increasing level of interest overall, in this case raising the profile of London’s poor air.