Media and Environment: Conflict, Politics and the News. Libby Lester. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2010. 205 pp. $69.95 hbk. $24.95 pbk.Because Libby Lester teaches journalism at the University of Tasmania, it is not surprising that Tasmanian environmental politics plays a prominent role in her exploration of the media's coverage of environmental issues. What is surprising is the broad scope of her exploration of similar coverage around the globe. The fact that she earned her doctorate at Cardiffand did postdoctoral research at Oxford not only helps to explain the breadth of her investigation, but also provides some clues about the approach she takes to making sense of all this diversity.While I have to admit that I began to tire of her ritualized incantations regarding the necessity of pointing out the complexities at the heart of the myriad relationships that shape, and are shaped by, the news media's coverage of environmental issues, I found more than enough detailed examples and analysis to allow me to draw some conclusions of my own about how this process actually works. There were even some good clues about how it might work in the future as the production, distribution, and consumption of news evolve.Lester has organized her book into seven chapters that make sense both individually and as an ensemble. The book begins, appropriately enough, with a brief historical review that outlines the rise of the environment as a policy concern. She draws on her own experience as a journalist who had been assigned to cover stories about the politics, rather than the science of environmental concerns.She begins her second chapter with a brief introduction of Habermasian notions of the public sphere filtered through an agenda setting/public arenas lens. She then tells an engaging story of the transformation of the environmental frame into an assessment of risk and the assignment of responsibility. In her view, it is through the framing of environmental risks that different publics are identified, mobilized, and transformed into activists who attempt to influence the public policy response.She also turns her attention to journalists and the various roles they play as arbitrators, advocates, interpreters, and engineers as they engage in the construction of the news. Here, too, I felt the influence of Cardiffand Oxford as she grants agency to the news as though it were somehow an actor or agent that constructs another version of reality itself. She invites us to ask, How do news texts do their work? with very little in the way of guidance. Fortunately, she soon turns her attention back to the work of journalists and the professional, structural, cultural, and institutional constraints under which they operate.Among those structural constraints is their reliance on sources of information, quotes, and sound bites. …