In Cardiff for the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association conference. I was convening a panel on war and the media, but the most interesting aspect of the conference was its preoccupation with environmentalism. George Monbiot was a keynote speaker, there were several paper on the media and the environment, and the conference organisers gave out hessian 'I am not a conference bag' bags, as a self-described 'gesture' toward green righteousess. What made all this particularly galling was the continual self-congratulation on how 'critical' media scholars supposedly are.
