If a Radical Screams in the Forest,Will She be Heard?

Abstract

This article analyzes the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage of the controversy over logging Headwaters, an ancient redwood forest in northern California. It contends that the Chronicle’s fundamental way of representing reality and judging the legitimacy of claims is through favoring an instrumental over ethical rationality. It concludes that this logic ends up limiting the ways that the main actors (Earth First! and Pacific Lumber) and the controversy itself are framed. This impacts the discursive landscape that the Chronicle creates because those in what Habermas (1984) calls the ‘systems world’ are favored over those in the ‘lifeworld’. The Chronicle’s coverage ends up setting up a set of unwritten criteria that embrace particular values and practices as necessary in order to be taken seriously as a political actor or speaker in relation to this environmental issue. This results from various journalistic routines and frameworks employed for constructing knowledge and legitimating actors and voices.