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Climate change: the Great Media Silence on Causes and Solutions |
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See Medialens: The Independent is feeling the heat from public criticism of its adverts pushing foreign travel, cars and endless consumerism. A recent editorial noted: “Just ponder this as you flick through those holiday brochures and even the travel pages of this newspaper to brighten up the grey January days... Fuelled by cheap flights, the British wanderlust seems far from sated. Fuelled is the operative word here. For the cost of cheap flights may be low in pounds sterling but the cost to the environment is high.” (28/01/2006)
It is rare indeed for a paper to even hint at the negative impacts of the advertising it carries. Over at the Independent on Sunday (IoS), deputy editor Michael Williams dismissed readers protesting the paper's climate-killing adverts as “a curmudgeonly lot of puritans, miseries, killjoys, Stalinists and glooms.” (22/01/2006)
Williams refuses to recognise that his paper’s heavy reliance on advertising revenue is only one of a series of filters protecting the public from unpalatable truths about power in society. The Independent and IoS environment editors - Michael McCarthy and Geoffrey Lean, respectively - are equally disinclined to subject the concept of economic 'growth' (actually, depletion of resources and increasing inequality worldwide), to critical examination, or to explore the hijacking of ‘democratically’ elected governments by corporate power. As for the media's integral role as part of the problem - forget it!
Read: "Climate change - Welcome to Mars (or North Korea)!" at:
http://www.medialens.org/ |
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