Abstract
Travel journalism is often characterized in terms of the highly commercialized nature of its content. As McGaurr (2010) has found this perception does not take account of instances when the genre exhibits ‘cosmopolitan’ potential by engaging in broader political discourses. This chapter seeks to further explore this potential in travel journalism. It does so in the context of a major environmentally focused news story that emerged from US President Trump’s administration during 2017 and 2018. On 26th April 2017, President Trump’s office issued two executive orders to review the size and status of 27 (of 129) ‘national monuments’ sites. A draft memo was leaked to The Washington Post. It advocated reducing the size of four national monuments—Utah’s vast Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, Nevada’s Gold Butte and Oregon’s Cascade-Siskiyou. Reviewing all American newspapers which are indexed on the Nexis database meant that it was possible to quantify and compare the coverage of this story in all sections of each paper with the coverage given in their travel sections. It finds that whilst the quantity of travel journalism that engages in the national monuments news story is small relative to the overall coverage this story attracted, it is nonetheless an example of the genre following the news agenda. It is also apparent that in such instances travel journalism makes use of modes of representation typically associated with news and current affairs journalism. This, in turn, provides further evidence of travel journalism’s cosmopolitan scope and potential, concluding that it can, under specific circumstances, be intensely political.
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Cocking, B. (2020). Selling it ‘Green’: Travel Journalism, Trump and the US National Monuments. In: Travel Journalism and Travel Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59908-7_6
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