Travel Journalism and Environmental Conflict: A Cosmopolitan Perspective

Although travel journalism can have considerable influence in one of the world's largest marketplaces, a definition remains elusive and the genre continues to be under-explored. The explanation may be a scholarly ambivalence towards the use of the word "journalism" to describe texts characterized by subjectivity and a conspicuous proximity to tourism advertising. Yet not all travel journalism is tourism's handmaiden. Drawing on examples of US and British newspaper and magazine travel articles that criticize forestry practices in Australia's island state of Tasmania, this paper attempts to understand better the genesis and deployment of political comment in a genre routinely subsidized and besieged by government public relations. The paper argues that travel journalism that subverts traditional expectations of the genre through its mediation of environmental conflict can usefully be understood as a textual manifestation of the cosmopolitan interplay of culture and environment arising out of transnational and cross-genre discourse. Noting Ulrich Beck's faith in the media to promote active political cosmopolitanism, the paper hypothesizes that further analysis of travel journalism has the potential to provide surprising insights into journalism, public relations and the mediation of global concern. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.