A few days ago Katrina vanden Heuvel asked an important question in WaPo:
Why isn’t the media covering climate change all day, every day?
She ventured a few of the standard answers:
So why isn’t the media covering this story all day, every day? There are several reasons, including the collapse of local daily newspapers and excessive conglomeratization. But the biggest reason right now is distraction. As [Margaret] Sullivan put it, “There is just so much happening at every moment, so many trees to distract from the burning forest behind them.”
And the Internet is the primary contributor to this. As the cost of disseminating information, true or false, has fallen, we’ve been inundated by the stuff. It’s like the locusts, not only in numbers, but even in their operationality. In case my reader didn’t know, locust swarms are about as you’d expect from the phrase, but the reason that they move en masse isn’t that they’re looking for something to eat so much as they’re trying to avoid being eaten. One locust will happily make a meal out of another, given the opportunity, so they’re all on the march in order to stay out of the maw of their cousin. Similarly, news comes fast and furious because each is pushing the others out of the way to get your attention.
Worse yet, the outlets have become ubiquitous. I don’t use “outlet” in the traditional meaning, such as a newspaper office, but, to select a concrete example, a device. It used to be that all the news was word of mouth; then came the printing presses, which permitted the creation of newspapers, dedicated, ideally, to the collection and dissemination of local news. The discovery and mastery of radio waves permitted their use as a new medium, and that led to its cousin, TV stations and televisions.
Now it’s the Internet age, and that 50 pound device sitting in the corner of the living room is now a 5 ounce smartphone in your pocket. Turn it on and it will ceaselessly blare “news” at you until your eyes cross and you get the jitters.
Literally. Metaphorically, literally.
As Andrew Sullivan has noted on several occasions, this may be the greatest damage the Web has inflicted on the United States, the near costlessness of information transfer cheapening and even blurring the information until we can’t truly evaluate whether information is true or false, trivial or monumental.
Speaking of, back to climate change. Heuvel (and her colleague Margaret Sullivan) want climate change to be on the front page of WaPo every day, but …
The corporate media seems to prefer distractions and even capitalizes on them. At least, that’s what veteran journalist Ted Koppel suggested in a recent conversation with CNN’s Brian Stelter. “CNN’s ratings would be in the toilet without Donald Trump,” Koppel said.
Stelter rebutted later in a tweet that the cable news business is “more complex than he makes it seem.”
Is it? In corporate media, ratings are prized above all else. So, the president gets his reality show because scandal plays better — and pays better — than substance. Then-CBS chief executive Les Moonves admitted as much in 2016 when he said that Trump’s political ascent was “damn good for CBS” and bragged that “the money’s rolling in.”
Which is a fantastic affirmation of two things. First, it marks President Trump’s instincts concerning the news media and his election leading to great profits as being top-tier[1], although some may argue this was obvious.
Second, it’s an affirmation of an observation and argument I’ve been developing and making for years, namely the transfer of processes and goals from one societal sector to another results in sub-optimal results, see here for more details. In this case, Heuvel and Sullivan would argue that the news media is not giving sufficient coverage to literally the most important topic in the world, climate change, while Moonves provides the description of the private sector process which motivates coverage selection and results in a sub-optimal selection.
Enough chest-thumping.
However, it would not be intellectually thorough to stop here. In this specific situation, it’s worth noting that the participation of the concerned individual common citizen or corporate entity, uncoordinated and possibly burdened with information of dubious quality, will be hesitant and possibly wrong. We’re facing a situation that, despite the Pentagon labeling it as a national security threat,
… has been described as a “catastrophe in slow motion.”
That is, it’s subtle, difficult to understand, and is larger than us.
That means we need the Federal government involved in a leadership position. EPA scientists have already sounded the alarm, in concert with scientists world-wide, fulfilling a critical function of government in detecting future disasters. But the balance of our government, with the exception of our vigilant military, is shirking its duty with respect to climate change. Elected officials run about with their hands over their eyes, shrieking No! No! No!
And this is where the dominance of the Trump Administration in the news cycle comes in. Through the constant drumbeat of negative results from the Administration and a GOP-dominated Congress across a spectrum of subjects, we’re becoming more and more aware of the necessity of replacing them. Clearly, the GOP has already rejected the science behind climate change, and so the paradigm behind putting climate change on the front page of all major newspapers every day is invalid – the responsible leaders[2] have already demonstrated their ideological loyalty to the “talking point” that climate change is a hoax.
The dominance of brand-destroying news from the White House and Congress should, in an ideal world dominated by honest news services, result in the expulsion from their positions and disgrace of every elected member of government who engaged in these activities which has enabled a national security threat. Today? That’s where the rubber will hit the road. Will the conservative news outlets, convinced that climate change is nothing more than a liberal hoax, win their propaganda war and retain enough of Congress to continue to forestall action on this very difficult and existential problem? Or will their base, which is just beginning to be chastened by physical evidence of climate change that smacked them in the nose, begin discarding those news sources that continue their allegiance to ideology over reality, and return to questions of news quality as their standard for selecting news sources, rather than the intellectually inferior method of merely finding a source that suits their predilections?
Or, in other words, if your news source isn’t making you uncomfortable, maybe you need a different news source.
So, in answer to Heuvel and Sullivan, the dominance of news other than that covering climate change isn’t an unalloyed negative; it is, instead, a necessity if we are to address climate change effectively. It may feel like the old observation concerning democracy,
The Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.[3]
It’ll leave us more badly damaged than if we had acted wisely in the first place, but if we measure up to being the best Americans we can, every one of us, then we’ll find a way to get through this.
1 I may consider Trump’s Presidency as one of the greatest incompetencies and calamities to ever grace the United States, but underestimating the true competencies, if any, of an opponent or adversary is the mark of the amateur buffoon.
2 That is, those leaders who will be held responsible when all is said and done.
3 Legend gives credit to the late British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, but apparently this is not true.
