McLuhan's Children: The Greenpeace Message and the Media by Stephen Dale

Author:Stephen Dale [Dale, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nature, General
ISBN: 9781896357041
Google: KNQNHYU0mDAC
Goodreads: 3675343
Publisher: Between the Lines
Published: 1996-01-15T11:09:16+00:00

McLuhan’s insights into the nature of electronic media have guided Greenpeace from the very beginning. As founding member Paul Watson told me: “The reason that Greenpeace rose from a grassroots organization to one of the largest environmental groups in the world is simple: it was the first organization to understand the nature of the media. It took a Marshall McLuhanesque approach to environmental campaigns. Very few organizations, even now, have learned to do that.”

Still, the shape of the industry has evolved over time – and so has Greenpeace’s adaptation to it. Tony Mariner was a key figure in the formation of Greenpeace Communications and an architect of the strategy that targeted the international television news brokers. A South African cameraman who first hooked up with Greenpeace during the 1977 Save the Whales voyage, Mariner recalls that a number of organizational and attitudinal shifts led to the replacement of the old Greenpeace Films with the new Greenpeace Communications. “Originally, it wasn’t actually seen as a news thing,” says Mariner, a grey-bearded freelancer (and occasional employee of Greenpeace) who smiles wistfully when he’s asked about the past.

The founding Greenpeace media experts were radio and print people who, when they thought visually, gravitated towards the more contemplative medium of documentary film. Television news, Mariner says, was a minor offshoot of their work until the very end of the 1970s, when Mariner began to forge a relationship with Viznews, the market leader among international news brokers of the time. Viznews was then co-owned by NBC, the BBC, and several smaller national broadcasters but was later sold to Reuters and transformed into Reuters TV. After Greenpeace discovered Viznews, “We started targeting and coming up with specific programs to hit the news, and to shoot it in a way that was right for them,” Mariner says, taking a break from his current project in the techno-dungeon that is the basement of the Greenpeace Corns building, where he’s been toying with the image of a spinning globe on the computer screen in front of him. The Viznews needs meant constructing Greenpeace campaign events into short, snappy items.

Sending footage out through agencies like Viznews gave Greenpeace an instant international impact. “Our idea was to reach the global audience through the agencies,” Mariner says. “And the direct action gave us, if you like, a product to sell, in terms of a news event. That’s one reason why direct action works. One of its effects is to create an impact. The other is to create a platform.”

Mariner is part hard-nosed, seasoned professional, and part unreconstructed idealist who speaks of his enduring commitment to the spiritual exercise of “bearing witness” – the practice of which, he says, invariably underlies a good Greenpeace action and the absence of which explains the bad ones. In short, Tony Mariner is a practical zealot. That goes a long way towards explaining his casual acceptance of the fact that Greenpeace – in order to deal with the news agencies – would have to sign away any

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