Media Constructions of Responsibility for the Production and Mitigation of Environmental Harms: The Case of Mercury-Contaminated Fish

Within the literature examining media depictions of crime and the criminal justice system, very little attention has been paid to the ways in which harms to the environment and human health have been constructed. This is not entirely surprising, given that the discipline of criminology has been reticent in addressing environmental harm more generally. This gap in the criminological imagination is beginning to be addressed within the growing field of green criminology, which seeks to focus attention on environmental harms as an important area of criminological investigation. Using a green criminological lens, this paper examines the case of mercury-contaminated fish as depicted in the Globe and Mail and New York Times from 2003 through 2008. Through qualitative content analysis, we examine the construction of responsibility for mercury contamination and for mitigating the attendant risks. We find that, in explaining the contamination of fish, both newspapers problematize the regulation of mercury-releasing industries by the state and pay a great deal of attention to the responsibility the state has to inform the public about the risks. However, little attention is paid to the responsibility of the mercury-releasing industries, the commercial fish industry, and restaurants and supermarkets to protect consumers. Furthermore, media attention is mainly directed at the responsibility of individual consumers – particularly those deemed most at risk of being harmed by mercury contamination – to limit the amount of mercury-rich fish they consume. These media depictions simultaneously foster a sense of individualized responsibility and normalize the risks posed by this environmental hazard, which is made to appear virtually inevitable, something that requires management, partly by the state, but mostly by vulnerable consumers.