| dc.description.abstract | The stories told in media shape how we perceive of the world, and in doing so, they play a significant part in determining whose worlds are allowed to exist and expand (or "grow"), and whose are to be eradicated. The social division and ecological devastation this space of power produces becomes less abstract, when looking closer at the reporting of corporate me-dia on spaces of socio-ecological conflict. On the cases of anti-mining struggles in Lützerath and anti-gentrification struggles in Aachen, this thesis presents a political ecology of media manipulation within the context of the German media landscape. Building on nearly five months of intensive on-site research and an analysis of 323 documents, 24 interviews I iden-tify dominant narratives dispersed in two regional mass media newspapers and discuss them as social management technologies to legitimize lignite mining and gentrification. Moreo-ver, I contrast dominant narratives to some on-the-ground realities emerging from within both struggles to illustrate the extent of distortion and demonstrate which worlds are system-atically silenced. The analysis of empirical material is moreover embedded in a detailed ex-ploration of social, economic, and political structures, as well as corporate and government intentions that constrain and shape news production according to corporate and government interests within both newspapers' publishers. Thereby, this thesis shines light on news pro-ducers' financial entanglements with (other) industries, instances of censorship, discrimina-tion, and a structural dependency on copy-pasting statements of authorities and corporate leaders, among others. Besides finding that both newspapers systematically distort the socio-ecological conflicts they claim to report on neutrally, I argue that they do so through distrac-tive and contradictory narratives which echo imperialist discourse and constitute a form of psychological violence by causing social conflict. Against this background, I moreover de-scribe land-based struggles as decolonial practices through the act of 're-inhabiting' spaces and landscapes "as if" they mattered. | eng |