This article examines the role of PR in the debate about global climate change. Seeking to move beyond a focus on PR as just the handmaiden of corporate power, the article documents the fluid role of professionalized communication in terms of its impact on both corporate and NGO actors and their activities, focusing on communication tactics and the influence of PR consultancies. Drawing from the debates around the transformation of the public sphere, the article argues that the climate change issue illustrates not only structural change but also a wider cultural transformation marked by the emergence of promotionalism as the dominant communicative logic of both powerful and institutionally weaker players. It is argued that although existing political and economic resources provide certain actors with significant advantages, these assets and the structural advantages they tend to accrue cannot alone determine the outcome of struggles over climate change policy and public opinion.

This article discusses service journalism — the way the news media provide their audiences with information, advice and help about the problems of everyday life — in light of the theory of the public sphere and the growth of subpolitics fostered by reflexive modernization. Service journalism addresses two main types of everyday problem — grievances and risks — but it tends to subsume the former under the latter due to the effects of promotionalism as an increasingly dominant logic shaping the popularization of media formats and content. Apropos the public sphere debate, we argue that service journalism addresses a hybrid social subject — part citizen, part consumer and part client. Moreover, despite the fact that service journalism tends to individualize problems, it is amenable to politicization inasmuch as it shares common ground — the problems of everyday life — with the social movements and advocacy/activism groups that are the collective, motive force of subpolitics. Subpolitics politicizes the problems of everyday life in the way that it tends to subsume risk under grievance and break with the exclusionary, binary logic of mediational politics. This allows plural identities, individualistic and collectivistic, to coexist in an ambivalent and fluid way.

This article provides a comparative analysis of adversarial framing oriented to reputation discrediting in the context of social movement/counter-movement relations. Website material associated with two Canadian organizations, the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (NRSP) and DeSmogBlog (DSB), involved on opposite sides of the contention over anthropogenic global warming (AGW), is analysed to examine how each side identifies and frames its adversaries and the latter's claims-making practices. The analysis focuses on the extent to which the structure of adversarial framing by each side differs from or is mirrored by the framing of the other side. Both sides discredit their opponents on the basis of five reputational dimensions: practices, moral character, competence and qualifications, social associations, and real versus apparent motivations. The principal point of difference concerns the main focus of discrediting, with the NRSP focusing chiefly on its opponents' claims-making practices and the DSB on moral character. Both discourses, nonetheless, create an integrated discrediting narrative in which all five dimensions are involved, with motivation acting as a cognitive and normative thread tying the other dimensions together.

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