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Adventures
in Media Surreality – Part 2
Global
Climate Catastrophe – Mustn’t Grumble
by
David Edwards and Media Lens
Dissident Voice
August 28, 2003
Read: Adventures in Media Surreality – Part 1: Blair’s Serious and Current Lies
Days
Of Carnage And Tears
In
the aftermath of September 11, the media reported endlessly on the likely
identities and motives of those responsible, on the options open to Western
leaders, and on the urgent need for decisive action. On September 12, 2001, for
example, an impassioned Guardian editorial wrote of, “the heartfelt conviction
that Britain and the British people... will do all in their power to assist the
American government in finding those who are responsible. The United States,
its government, and its people did not deserve this. For this day of carnage
and tears there can be no justification or excuse”. (Leader, ‘The sum of all
our fears’, The Guardian, September 12, 2001)
Compare
and contrast the media response to the many days of carnage and tears being
wrought by climate change: 13,600 additional deaths reported during France’s
record-breaking heatwave this month, 1,500 heat-related deaths in India, 1,316
deaths in Portugal in two weeks, 500-1,000 deaths in the Netherlands, 900
additional deaths in Britain, 569 deaths in China. In Italy and Spain, death
rates have risen by 20% in some areas.
Professor
John Schellnhuber, head of the UK's Tyndall centre says: “What we are seeing is
absolutely unusual. We know that global warming is proceeding apace, but most
of us were thinking that in 20-30 years time we would be seeing hot spells
[like this]. But it's happening now." (‘Global warming may be speeding up,
fears scientist’ John Vidal, The Guardian, August 6, 2003)
Latest
predictions suggest that earlier forecasts have badly underestimated the extent
and rate of climate change. The Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR)
reports that catastrophic runaway global warming is likely unless the US, the
world's biggest polluter, can be persuaded to take action.
On
August 18, David Rose reported the closure of Europe’s Mont Blanc:
“This
year, for the first time since its conquest in 1786, the heatwave has made
western Europe's highest peak too dangerous to climb... The conditions have
been so extreme, say glaciologists and climate experts, and the retreat of the
Alps' eternal snows and glaciers so pronounced, that the range - and its
multi-billion-pound tourist industry - may never fully recover. The freak
weather, with no substantial snowfall since February, means pylons holding up
ski-lifts and cable cars may be too dangerous to use next winter.” (‘Record
heatwave closes Mont Blanc to tourists - Dramatic proof of global warming as
peaks begin to crumble in high temperatures and snowline retreats’, David Rose,
The Observer, August 17, 2003)
Dr
Jonathan Bamber, reader in glaciology at Bristol University, said that the
damage to the Alpine environment may be irreparable:
“People
don't seem prepared to take real notice of [global warming] and start to press
for something to be done until it affects their own backyard and livelihood.
What's happened to the Alps this year, coming after a long run of very warm
years, is almost an allegory for the kind of events that may take place
elsewhere... This is a major wake-up call, and no way is a normal winter going
to put this back.“ (Ibid)
Last
year the US National Academy of Sciences warned of a very sudden global climate
disaster, perhaps within the next ten years. Reviewing the academy's report,
the then UK environment minister, Michael Meacher, wrote:
"We
do not have much time and we do not have any serious option. If we do not act
quickly to minimise runaway feedback effects we run the risk of making this
planet, our home, uninhabitable." (Watt, 'US rejection of Kyoto climate
plan "risks uninhabitable Earth"', The Guardian, May 16, 2002)
While
the media does report the latest disasters and warnings in this way, there are
few serious attempts to explore the identity and motives of opponents to action
on climate change, or to draw attention to the vast scale of the folly being
imposed on the world by those responsible. The refusal to respond to climate
change is presented almost as a natural human phenomenon, or is loosely blamed
on “America” or “China”. But the opponents of action are easily identifiable.
The
US National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), for example, representing much
of US industry, was candid enough in its letter to George W. Bush in May 2001:
"Dear
Mr. President:
On
behalf of 14,000 member companies of the National Association of Manufacturers
(NAM) - and the 18 million people who make things in America - thank you for
your opposition to the Kyoto Protocol on the grounds that it exempts 80 percent
of the world and will cause serious harm to the United States." (Michael
E. Baroody, NAM Executive Vice President, Letter to the President Concerning
the Kyoto Protocol, May 16, 2001, http://www.nam.org)
The
website adds further:
"The
NAM strongly opposes the [Kyoto] accord... President Bush also opposes Kyoto
and is now pursuing a more reasonable approach to climate change."
That
other great voice of US business, the US Chamber of Commerce, declared in a
letter to the US president:
"Global
warming is an important issue that must be addressed - but the Kyoto Protocol
is a flawed treaty that is not in the U.S. interest." (www.uschamber.org, July 19, 2001)
The
US Chamber’s website notes that it is the world's largest business federation
representing more than “three million businesses and organisations of every
size, sector and region”.
You
will do well to find even whispered references to this extraordinary depth of
business opposition in what is, after all, a corporate press. The fact and
significance of the NAM’s opposition, for example, has never been explored by
the Guardian or the Independent.
Instead,
a threat that makes international terrorism look trivial is often treated
whimsically. The Independent’s editors commented this month on Britain hitting
the 100F mark:
”Inevitably,
it was late and we almost despaired of its arriving. Finally, though, the wish
produced the fact... We can boast that ours was the generation that first
experienced subtropical Britain.” (Leader, ‘Under pressure’, The Independent,
August 11, 2003)
In
an equally surreal editorial (headed ‘Mustn’t grumble’) the Guardian wrote:
“At
last the hot nights, strumming crickets and warm sea which we usually pay so
much to visit for a fortnight's package holiday are here on our doorstep.
Rejoice, as Lady Thatcher once instructed us, rejoice. But er ... judging by the comatose and in
some quarters almost hostile reaction to the heatwave, Britain has a long way
to go before centuries of phlegm and caution are discarded for the fervour and
excitement of permanently warmer climes.” (‘Mustn't grumble... Summer heats up
to more than 311K’, Leader, The Guardian, August 11, 2003)
No
matter that thousands have died already, or that the London-based Global
Commons Institute predicts more than two million deaths from climate
change-related disasters worldwide over the next decade. Journalists joke about
airliners slamming into buildings at their peril, and challenging the
fabricated ‘threat’ of Iraqi WMDs can see you barracked and smeared, dragged
before MPs’ committees and banned from reporting. But climate change has not
been labelled a “serious and current threat” by the people with the power to
make things real for journalists.
Strategies Of Denial
Particularly
since September 11, Western commentators have been eager to identify religion
as the root of much of the world’s evil. Polly Toynbee wrote in the Guardian:
“This
is about confronting religion at a time when it threatens global Armageddon. It
is there in the born-again Christian fundamentalism demanded of every US
politician, turning them all into ‘crusaders’. It drives on the murderous
Islamic jihadists. It makes mad the biblical land-grabbing Israeli settlers. It
threatens nuclear nemesis between the Hindus and Muslims along the
India-Pakistan border... religion is not nice, it kills: it is toxic in the
places where people really believe it.” (‘Religion isn't nice. It kills’, Polly
Toynbee, The Guardian, September 6, 2002)
In
reality, however, modern democratic society is filled with irrational beliefs
that are quite as dangerous as any of the dogmas of theistic religion. There
can be little doubt, for example, that many people perceive a pattern and
direction in modern consumer society that echoes the “manifest destiny”
proclaimed by American colonists justifying the annihilation of Native American
society. In 1845, John O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, declared
it:
“Our
manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the
free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” (Quoted, Howard Zinn, A
People’s History of the United States, HarperPerennial, 1990, p.149)
How
many people today - in awe of ever faster computers, ever miniaturising cell
phones, nanotechnology, and the rest take it for granted that it is our
“manifest destiny” to progress towards an ever more sophisticated and powerful
technological future? These are the same people unmoved by the most astonishing
irony of our time, that while corporate adverts endlessly persuade us to fixate
on the latest technological tweak to modern comfort, we are blind to the fact
that the natural world around us is literally falling apart. Theodore Roszak
comments:
“Sick
souls may indeed be the fruit of sick families and sick societies; but what, in
turn, is the measure of sickness for society as a whole? While many criteria
might be nominated, there is surely one that ranks above all others: the
species that destroys its own habitat in pursuit of false values, in wilful
ignorance of what it does, is ‘mad’ if the word means anything.” (Roszak, The
Voice Of The Earth, Simon & Schuster, 1992, p.68)
The
belief, often sincere, that people are working as part of a state-corporate
system contributing to the positive development of society makes it extremely
hard for them to recognise the destructive impact of their actions it
challenges their whole sense of who they are as benign, reasonable people. This
is surely why so many of us, journalists included, find it so hard to recognise
the Western subordination of Third World people to profit, and the catastrophic
subordination of planet to profit.
Consider,
also, the remarkable superstition surrounding the ethics of employment.
Innumerable documentaries and news reports this summer have shown British
servicemen in the Gulf pilots mutilating people with cluster bombs,
submariners incinerating people with cruise missiles declaring their hatred
of war but adding: “I’m just doing my job.” In reality, of course, there is no
rational basis whatever for the view that paid employment overrides other human
and ethical considerations. It is almost as if employees label themselves
‘soldier’, ‘sailor’, ‘Washington correspondent’, and then actually come to
believe that the label defines the reality.
The
BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan who exposed deep concerns in the intelligence
community about government ‘spin’ on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction - has
been rebuked by several MPs for “making the news rather than reporting it”.
According to this view, the fact that someone is employed to report on politics
means they are stripped of all ethical responsibilities for exposing government
lies and protecting human life. But why is it unreasonable for a journalist to
be a good citizen as well as a good reporter? In his brilliant study of the
professional mindset, Disciplined Minds, Jeff Schmidt writes:
“Professionalism
in particular the notion that experts should confine themselves to their
‘legitimate professional concerns’ and not ‘politicise’ their work helps keep
individual professionals in line by encouraging them to view their narrow
technical orientation as a virtue, a sign of objectivity rather than of
subordination. This doesn’t mean that experts are forbidden to let independent
political thoughts cross their minds. They can do so as citizens, of course,
and they can even do so as experts, but then only in the ‘proper’ places and in
the ‘proper’ way.” (Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried
Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives, Rowman
& Littlefield Publishers, 2000, p.204)
Finally,
we might also consider the related, irrational tendency to depend on authority
for definitions of reality. As we have discussed above, a threat only truly
becomes a threat for the media when it is defined as such by people in power. A
rationalisation for this is undoubtedly the argument that the views of elected
officials should be reported and discussed as a service to democracy. But,
again, this ‘professional’ view of media reporting becomes absurd when it is
allowed to override our own capacity for independent thought and critical
analysis.
If
we know perfectly well, for example, that the main political parties are all
beholden to corporate interests, that they therefore focus on threat responses
that benefit business but not on responses that damage business; and if we know
that these ignored issues present a grave threat to human life, then obviously
it is our job as journalists to discuss them.
David Edwards is the editor of Media Lens, and the author of Burning All
Illusions: A Guide to Personal and Political Freedom (South End
Press, 1996). Email: editor@medialens.org. Visit the Media
Lens website: http://www.MediaLens.org
SUGGESTED ACTION
The
goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for
others. In writing letters to journalists, we strongly urge readers to maintain
a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Write
to the media. Sample letter:
When
is your organisation going to afford the growing global climate catastrophe the
kind of coverage you have long afforded the comparatively trivial threat of
international terrorism? When will you expose the machinations and breathtaking
irresponsibility of big business in obstructing even the beginnings of a
response to climate change? Why are the companies and business associations
involved not named and shamed for their complicity in crimes against humanity?
Why is there no media campaign demanding immediate action by our politicians on
climate change?
Write
to Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian:
Email:
alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk
Write
to Simon Kelner, editor of The Independent:
Email:
s.kelner@independent.co.uk
Write
to Tristan Davies, editor of The Independent on Sunday:
Email:
t.davies@independent.co.uk
Write
to Richard Sambrook, director of BBC news:
Email:
richard.sambrook@bbc.co.uk
Write
to ITN's head of news gathering, Jonathan Munro
Email:
jonathan.munro@itn.co.uk
Feel
free to respond to Media Lens alerts: editor@medialens.org
Other Recent Articles by David Edwards
and Media Lens
* Adventures
in Media Surreality – Part 1: Blair’s Serious and Current Lies
* Biting the
Hand That Feeds – Part 2
* Stenographers
to Power: "Saddam Loyalists" Or "Anti-Occupation Forces"?
Ask The BBC