Discourse, and Power Working Group a part of Brown University's Climate Social Science Network. Her research concentrates on the climate-media-democracy nexus and explores critical questions of power and meaning-making around climate change. She co-edited the book entitled Climate Change and Journalism: Negotiating Rifts of Time (2021) and has published numerous papers in peer-reviewed journals including Environmental Communication, Journal of Language and Politics, Journal of Environmental Media, Media Theory, and Politique Américaine.
Morris applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power, with the following results:
Page 99 of my book has the re-printed image of the cover of The New York Times Magazine’s August 5, 2018, special climate change issue. The cover story was written by the journalist Nathaniel Rich. And as I write in my book: “The cover’s headline is written in small white text atop a black background, almost like the prophetic text of a Magic 8-Ball appearing in the void, and ominously declares: ‘Thirty years ago, we could have saved the planet.’”Visit Hanna E. Morris's website.
In addition to The New York Times Magazine cover image, my following words appear along with the magazine cover:The prophecy of a planet in peril that scientists like James Hansen warned about, according to Rich, went unheeded due to the careless “masses” duped and manipulated by fossil fuel executives, lobbyists, and the Republican politicians who benefited financially from Big Oil. The out-group is the Republican Party and Big Oil, but Rich elevates the prophet—climate scientists like James Hansen—without much interest in anyone else. Climate activists, environmental justice campaigns, and the many people who have been organizing in response to climate change for decades are sidestepped and even blamed as part of “the masses” who did not follow Hansen’s call soon enough.Readers opening to page 99 of my book would get a good idea of the whole work. It firstly gives a glimpse of the book’s critical analysis of U.S. news media (both images and text). It secondly highlights how news stories and visuals on climate change repeatedly center and celebrate “visionary sage figures” while denigrating climate activists and especially young, progressive, women of color who are a part of the climate justice movement. At its core, "apocalyptic authoritarianism" entails the construction of a “right” and “wrong” way of knowing and responding to climate change that fearmongers about an all-encompassing, apocalyptic collapse if historically privileged figures (i.e. visionary sages) are not heeded and followed. In turn, exclusionary modes of governance are legitimized as necessary while more robustly democratic alternatives are delegitimized as destabilizing and dangerous. Traditional centers of power are elevated as gods capable of “saving” the nation and planet while historically marginalized groups are demeaned as "militant Others" who are threatening this Earth-saving work. It is here where my book shows how the authority of historically privileged figures is normalized and bolstered by the U.S. press as opposed to investigated and questioned. Ultimately, my book shows how some of the most prominent news publications of record in the U.S. are fanning the flame of apocalyptic authoritarianism instead of reckoning with the roots and ramifications of both climate change and the reactionary politics of today.
--Marshal Zeringue
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