Talking Green in the Public Sphere: Press Releases, Corporate Voices and the Environment

In a climate of growing public concern and monitoring of business’s impact on the environment, corporations and industry groups have developed increasingly sophisticated strategies to manage their environmental reputation and to influence the outcome of environmental debates in the public sphere. In this article, we provide an exploratory overview of how the largest Swedish corporations selectively subsidise environmental news-making by supplying it with promotional materials disguised as journalistic copy. We analyse a year’s worth of public relations output from the largest 15 companies traded in the Stockholm exchange or owned by the Swedish state, in order to shed light on the environmental themes they cover, the techniques they adopt to maximise the likelihood of media coverage and the evidence they provide to support their claims. Our analysis shows that corporate voices make substantial use of environmental and ecological arguments in their strategic communication, but they provide little useful information about the company’s impact and do not usually foster forms of dialogic stakeholder engagement.