Friday, January 17, 2014

Corporate Media Is Ignoring The Problem Of Climate Change


The world's climate is changing, and it is due to warming caused by the overuse of fossil fuels (that pumps huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the air). Over 95% of the world's scientists (and 98% of climate scientists) know this, and they have been trying to get people to listen and make their governments do something about it before it is too late. And that "too late" is approaching fast. Recently the concentration of CO2 has passed the 400 parts per million level -- a level never seen before in human history.

And yet, while climate change may well be the most important story of our time, it is a story that is being mostly ignored by the mainstream broadcast media. The charts above show just how bad this problem has become. Note that on all the Sunday morning news programs (CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX) combined, climate change only received 27 minutes of air time FOR THE ENTIRE YEAR OF 2013! And if you add in the nightly news broadcasts for the entire year, the figure only climbs to about 129 minutes.

And the truly sad part of this is that the paltry numbers shown above are actually an improvement. For the last three years the number of minutes devoted to reporting on climate change has been even lower.

It has become abundantly clear that our politicians will do nothing about global climate change until they are forced to do it. They receive too much lobbying (and campaign money) from the corporations. And it is now equally clear that we cannot depend on the mainstream media to put pressure on those politicians by reporting the truth about climate change. The media is owned by those same giant corporations (who profit from the pollution and don't want to have to pay to clean up their own mess). Those corporations don't want the truth to be reported.

That means it is up to us as individuals to apply the needed pressure. And if we don't, the government and the corporations will continue to lead us down the path to destruction (aided by the media). I wish that wasn't true, but it is. If we don't act to elect better officials, we will leave our descendants a far worse world than the one we inherited, and it may well be a world too far down that path to destruction for them to fix.

No comments:

Post a Comment

ANONYMOUS COMMENTS WILL NOT BE PUBLISHED. And neither will racist,homophobic, or misogynistic comments. I do not mind if you disagree, but make your case in a decent manner.