It’s ironic that I just wrote about how the alternative media is covering climate change more than ever, because the opposite is true of the American “mainstream media.” Today MSNBC, for example, talked more about Michael Jackson’s daughter’s recent haircut than they talked about the climate crisis. Meanwhile, the coal and oil industries continue to advertise with abandon while we are sleeping. This would merely be incredibly annoying if so much weren’t at stake.
How often does American media cover environmental protests? Environmental protesters demonstrate outside the Shell headquarters building, in central London September 1, 2009. The protesters were part of a Climate Camp protest group who are camping at Blackheath in south-east London.
Our Last Chance to Preserve Life On Earth Is Slipping Away
By Larry Schweiger, Fulcrum Publishing
This excerpt was reprinted from the book Last Chance: Preserving Life on Earth by Larry J. Schweiger with permission from Fulcrum Publishing.
In the Absence of Light
A few years ago, we invited a group of low-income children from urban Pittsburgh to visit a distant natural area in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, for an owl watch. As night fell, the children became startled as they got their first glimpse of the myriad bright stars set in a clear, black sky. These kids had never seen a night sky in the absence of ambient light. Urban haze and light pollution had completely blocked their view of the heavens and dimmed their sense of the magnitude of creation.
Shallow news coverage causes most Americans to underestimate the urgency of the threat of global warming. Television’s failure to adequately cover the climate threat, along with the deliberate opacity created by massive oil and coal advertising, masks the vivid realities of the situation, much like the haze and light pollution blocked out the reality of the night sky for those urban kids.
The television has been described as a weapon of mass distraction. On hearing about the methane leaking from the Siberian Sea, one Canadian blogger mockingly wrote, “Runaway climate change? Massive methane release off Siberia? Nah, let’s talk about Wall Street instead!” Meanwhile, on “the upper decks of our ‘Titanic,’ everyone is worried stiff about a crisis on Wall Street.”
Denial is a too-common human tendency, especially around global warming. On June 23, 2008, twenty years since he first warned Congress that human activity was causing the earth to warm, James Hansen warned that a “wide gap has developed between what is understood about global warming by the relevant scientific communities and what is known by policymakers and the public.”
Continue Reading → Shallow Mainstream News Coverage Under-Reports the Climate Crisis
