Commentary: Media Coverage of the World Summit on Sustainable Development

Abstract

Environment News Service, the environment news wire service, listed more than 150 stories related to Rio+10 by February 2002, a full six months before the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) was scheduled to begin. But the WSSD did not appear on the Society of Environmental Journalists’ online calendar until late July, and that came only after much prodding. The dissimilar interest between environmental activists and environmental journalists foretold what eventually happened in Johannesburg, South Africa, 24 August to 4 September 2002. The WSSD promised a follow-up to commitments made ten years earlier at the unparalleled Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro. The Johannesburg meeting offered an opportunity to assess change, successes, and failures in terms of improving the condition of the world’s environment for both rich and poor countries and, possibly, to establish real implementation guidelines. (For summaries of previous sustainability conferences, see Lewis 2000; Valenti 2000a, 2000b.) Skepticism prevailed. Nonetheless, governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), international organizations, business, and what has become in sustainability jargon “civil society” came