The Corporate Media - A Case in Point

[don]

if the numbers cited are accurate, corporate media control of the climate question is total. I assume this level of control extends to other questions as well . . . .

CBS had the least climate change coverage, devoting four minutes to the topic in three years. Altogether, in 2011, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox spent twice as much time discussing Donald Trump's "will he, won't he" run for president rather than climate change. NBC's Meet the Press devoted 23 minutes to Trump that year – but not a single minute to climate change.

While there is virtually no mention of climate change in the local news, reporters have turned the weather into a national pastime. Perhaps this is because storms, hurricanes and tornadoes ignite a primal reaction, whereas climate change requires an intellectual one. There is also a perception of trust that grows from constant visibility on television – although we poke fun at the weatherman, we still hide in our closets during tornado warnings. On the other hand, we regard PhD-level climate scientists with suspicion, even though their work must hold up to rigorous peer review.

The weather versus climate conflict illustrates what behavioral economists have said for years:

"We base our decisions on emotion far more than reason."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...climate-change

[GRG55]

Re: The Corporate Media - A Case in Point

if the numbers cited are accurate, corporate media control of the climate question is total. I assume this level of control extends to other questions as well . . . .

CBS had the least climate change coverage, devoting four minutes to the topic in three years. Altogether, in 2011, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox spent twice as much time discussing Donald Trump's "will he, won't he" run for president rather than climate change. NBC's Meet the Press devoted 23 minutes to Trump that year – but not a single minute to climate change.

While there is virtually no mention of climate change in the local news, reporters have turned the weather into a national pastime. Perhaps this is because storms, hurricanes and tornadoes ignite a primal reaction, whereas climate change requires an intellectual one. There is also a perception of trust that grows from constant visibility on television – although we poke fun at the weatherman, we still hide in our closets during tornado warnings. On the other hand, we regard PhD-level climate scientists with suspicion, even though their work must hold up to rigorous peer review.

The weather versus climate conflict illustrates what behavioral economists have said for years:

"We base our decisions on emotion far more than reason."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...climate-change

There's a reason it's called the Boob Tube.

The mainstream media is there to entertain (and sell advertising). Don, back when you and I were kids remember there used to be cartoons every Saturday morning - with lots of high-sugar content cereal commercials during the breaks. Now that we Boomers have grown up they are just going after the same audience with "adult cartoons"...how else to explain the celebrity-obsessed fascination with wardrobe failures, Lohan's latest court appearance, Paris Hilton & the Kardashians, the "47%", reality TV, topless Duchesses and all the other mindless pap fed to the starving masses daily. And, acknowledging our advancing years, the cereal ads appear to have given way to ED pillmongers :-)

The author's outrage is touchingly comical; equating "intellectual" with ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox.

"We base our decisions on emotion far more than reason."

Imagine that. Where is he from? Mars? Quick, somebody show him how to use his remote to get to PBS...that might be the closest thing to "intellectual" he's ever going to see coming out of a television set. But warn him to tune out the documentary music soundtracks...after all we wouldn't want him to be ruled by emotion...

[don]

Re: The Corporate Media - A Case in Point

+1 Well done

[c1ue]

Re: The Corporate Media - A Case in Point

The article is also highly inaccurate.

Am I to believe that only 11 or so minutes a year are devoted to 'climate change' when there is a media frenzy whenever a weather related disaster strikes, or there is a UN conference, or some moronic AGW protester chains himself to the White House, a coal fired electricity plant, or whatever?

There are already an ongoing series of Congressional hearings in the US. There are literally billions spent every year on climate change research and related subjects.

To whine about insufficient coverage ... puh-lease.

[don]

Re: The Corporate Media - A Case in Point

CBS had the least climate change coverage, devoting four minutes to the topic in three years.

If this is indicative of MSM coverage, I stand by my comment - corporate media control in the MSM is total. That was the point, not that climate change is necessarily man made.

there is a media frenzy whenever a weather related disaster strikes

is in itsef a misdirection comment.

there is virtually no mention of climate change in the local news

and that includes the Weather Channel.

[Slimprofits]

Re: The Corporate Media - A Case in Point

It's important to note that the stats mentioned in Don's first post are from Sunday morning talk (NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox) shows only.

If you click through to the Media Matters link you can see what they claim are the stats for NBC, ABC and CBS Nightly News as well.

The study has nothing to do with local news, The Weather Channel, MSNBC, Current, PBS, Fox News (on weekday evenings) or anything on MSM websites, in print or on the radio.

[don]

Re: The Corporate Media - A Case in Point

Are you suggesting climate change is aired on the networks outside that band of programming - i.e. running counter to both ownership and sponsors interests? My albeit poor anecdotal exposure is it's not. Does anybody have any data on that score.

[Slimprofits]

Re: The Corporate Media - A Case in Point

Are you suggesting climate change is aired on the networks outside that band of programming - i.e. running counter to both ownership and sponsors interests? My albeit poor anecdotal exposure is it's not. Does anybody have any data on that score.

I won't doubt what you say about Fox News, MSNBC, PBS, local news, TWC and Current on the ol' b00b tube.

However, MSM websites have near infinite space and time.

Doesn't this say it all right here:

The Associates Press with an article (that you can find published on many MSM websites, including local news) asking why climate change isn't a larger topic in the 2012 campaign - http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2012/0...global-warming


see for yourself, i.e. the infinite space

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/s...ing/index.html

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17032586/

http://topics.cnn.com/topics/global_climate_change

http://news.yahoo.com/topics/climate...lobal-warming/

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/index

http://topics.bloomberg.com/climate-change/

http://www.npr.org/sections/environment/



see also, internet quickly gaining on TV as the #1 source for news for Americans:

http://stateofthemedia.org/2012/over.../key-findings/

http://stateofthemedia.org/2011/onli...y/data-page-7/

[Thailandnotes]

Re: The Corporate Media - A Case in Point

Don’s initial point is well taken. It’s too bad climate change was the topic, better the invasion of Iraq or the gulf oil spill.

It’s hard to get a sense of how American’s get their news even with stats like these…

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...rt3/stats.html

Someone said to me this summer: “About 130 million people voted in the last presidential election. Roughly 25-30 million listen to Rush Limbaugh. Most of them probably vote and probably don’t listen to NPR. Roughly 25-30 million listen to NPR. Most of them probably vote and probably don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh. The rest are in between.”

FLORIDA, September 18, 2012 — There seems to be a distinct lack of journalism in the news industry these days.
Whether one is reading an online magazine or watching a cable news channel, there is an excellent chance that more opinion than fact is being communicated. Several decades ago, this sort of thing would have been frowned upon, to put it mildly. Why have media standards fallen as the times changed?

Chris Hedges is one of America's foremost investigative journalists. His commitment to seeing a story through has earned him no shortage of respect and animosity. In a detailed discussion with me, he explains his views about our era of infotainment, how it came about, and why it is bad for the country.
****
Joseph F. Cotto: Why, in your opinion, have cable news stations gained such traction over the last few decades?

Chris Hedges: The steady decline of newsprint has seen an erosion of journalism that is based on verifiable fact. Newspapers, although they certainly had failings, nevertheless sent reporters out to report stories that were then edited and fact checked before they reached the public. Television used to do the same. The public discourse centered largely, at least within the mainstream, on facts.

In the new media culture this careful process of establishing verifiable fact has largely been dispensed with. First of all, the news cycle is so rapid there is little time to report and less time to check information. Secondly, the decline of fact-based journalism means that it is easier, and indeed more profitable, to peddle opinions and emotions as facts. Liberal and conservative, right-wing and left-wing, all retreat into these ideological ghettos where opinions are only confirmed.
The democratic quality of newspapers, which when they arrived on your doorstep gave you stories and opinions that often forced you to question your assumptions, have been replaced by electronic systems of information that cater to our prejudices. Cable news does this now through FOX News or MSNBC. It is all court gossip, the same ridiculous agenda, spun differently. And it ignores the central and important issues that actually affect most Americans, especially egregiously the political paralysis that makes the government unable to respond rationally to the economic and environmental crisis that has beset the nation and the planet.

Cotto: In your experience, do most Americans want a serious presentation of the facts while watching a news program? Or, are they looking for evidence to validate their respective viewpoints?

Hedges: If you look at the opinion polls the public has about as much confidence in the press as it does in Congress. I think the public does want an honest reckoning of the times, but they will never get it from commercial networks that slavishly cater to ratings and the whims of corporate advertisers.
Corporate money has corrupted media, even on NPR and PBS. It has muted real journalism or rendered it extinct. On the commercial airwaves celebrity journalists, who earn millions of dollars, function as game show hosts or entertainers. I find them deeply cynical. They allow one side of the political spectrum to lie and spin and then allow another side to lie and spin and call this balance and objectivity. They have no commitment to the truth, and more importantly to the viewer or the reader.

This creed of false objectivity is a convenient and very profitable way to avoid confronting unpleasant truths or alienating a power structure on which news organizations depend for access and profits. This creed transforms reporters into neutral observers or voyeurs. As long as one viewpoint is balanced by another, usually no more than what Sigmund Freud would term “the narcissism of minor difference,” the job of a reporter is deemed complete. But this is a method that obscures the truth.

Cotto: Print publications, by and large, are going the way of the dinosaurs. Internet news outlets, meanwhile, are flourishing. During the years ahead, do you believe that this will contribute to or detract from the problem of media bias?

Hedges: The real danger we face now is the death of reporting. There is very little reporting done on the Internet. And I fear that the skills of reporting are being lost. Reporters are going the way of blacksmiths. The newspapers, for a few glorious decades, had a monopoly connecting sellers with buyers.
This monopoly has ended. Commercial interests have far more precise and sophisticated ways now to reach consumers. And this means that it will be very hard for reporters to make a living, as the thousands of reporters and editors who had lost there jobs in the last decade illustrate. The middle class living that was once possible for journalists is over.

Journalism will continue to exist, but those who practice journalism will survive on the margins, much the way classic actors or musicians survive on the margins of society. They will become members of the working class.

Cotto: Today, anyone can favor a news outlet on the basis of his or her political stances. In the long run, will this allow media bias to run even more rampant?

Hedges: Media bias has already created a growing divide within the country. We no longer use the same narratives to describe our reality. This is very dangerous. It creates antagonistic narratives that are often not be rooted in fact. This makes communication within the society, as well as compromise, extremely difficult. And in times of turmoil or crisis you will see the society fragmented into parts that are no longer able to communicate.

Cotto: On both sides of the political spectrum, new media outlets have emerged to seriously challenge established sources. Why do you think that this has taken place? Does it have anything to do with bias, or might other factors be at work?

Hedges: The established sources need to be challenged. The so-called experts acceptable to the systems of information dominated by roughly a half dozen corporations offer up a narrow spectrum of opinion and eschew any serious critiques of power. They were as wrong about invading Iraq as they were about the utopian creed of globalization and unregulated capitalism. And yet these same tired pundits manage to hang on to their positions as if nothing happened. The new media has at least given space for divergent opinions and critiques that the mainstream shut out.

[Slimprofits]

Re: The Corporate Media - A Case in Point

From the two successive Pew reports:






No matter the device, digital news consumption continued upward in 2011. Monthly unique audience to the top news sites was up 17%, a similar increase from 2009 to 2010, according to Nielsen Online. Seventeen of those 25 continue to be legacy news outlets.


and this:

[Slimprofits]

Re: The Corporate Media - A Case in Point

Headline on Google News today - link to WaPo:
Climate change will shift marine predators’ habitat, study says

[c1ue]

Re: The Corporate Media - A Case in Point

If this is indicative of MSM coverage, I stand by my comment - corporate media control in the MSM is total. That was the point, not that climate change is necessarily man made.

The problem is: what exactly constitutes climate change coverage?

Does a weather disaster in which a comment is made at the end that this is a result of climate change (AGW or otherwise) - which part is considered 'climate change'? The whole broadcast or just the one sentence?

When CBS covered the Copenhagen summit, was this considered 'climate change' coverage?

What about when some actor talks about climate change - is this considered coverage?

And the Presidential candidates slamming each other over climate change or lack thereof?

My view is that this statistic is highly suspect.

is in itsef a misdirection comment.

You think so, but I don't. For one thing, just about every MSM coverage on a major disaster has some line in it somewhere about climate change.

there is virtually no mention of climate change in the local news

And why should there be climate change coverage in local news? Isn't climate change a national phenomenon?

Seems more like a complaint about not being the center of attention.

[don]

Re: The Corporate Media - A Case in Point

no sooner said then a climate changer pops up on page 4 of the Times . . .


A Melting Greenland Weighs Perils Against Potential



By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

NARSAQ, Greenland — As icebergs in the Kayak Harbor pop and hiss while melting away, this remote Arctic town and its culture are also disappearing in a changing climate.

Narsaq’s largest employer, a shrimp factory, closed a few years ago after the crustaceans fled north to cooler water. Where once there were eight commercial fishing vessels, there is now one.

As a result, the population here, one of southern Greenland’s major towns, has been halved to 1,500 in just a decade. Suicides are up.

“Fishing is the heart of this town,” said Hans Kaspersen, 63, a fisherman. “Lots of people have lost their livelihoods.”

But even as warming temperatures are upending traditional Greenlandic life, they are also offering up intriguing new opportunities for this state of 57,000 — perhaps nowhere more so than here in Narsaq.

Vast new deposits of minerals and gems are being discovered as Greenland’s massive ice cap recedes, forming the basis of a potentially lucrative mining industry.

One of the world’s largest deposits of rare earth metals — essential for manufacturing cellphones, wind turbines and electric cars — sits just outside Narsaq.

This could be momentous for Greenland, which has long relied on half a billion dollars a year in welfare payments from Denmark, its parent state. Mining profits could help Greenland become economically self sufficient, and may someday even render it the first sovereign nation created by global warming.

“One of our goals is to obtain independence,” said Vittus Qujaukitsoq, a prominent labor union leader.

But the rapid transition from a society of individual fishermen and hunters to an economy supported by corporate mining raises difficult questions. How would Greenland’s insular settlements tolerate an influx of thousands of Polish or Chinese construction workers, as has been proposed? Will mining despoil a natural environment essential to Greenland’s national identity — the whales and seals, the silent icy fjords, and mythic polar bears? Can fishermen reinvent themselves as miners?

“I think mining will be the future, but this is a difficult phase,” said Jens B. Frederiksen, Greenland’s housing and infrastructure minister and a deputy premier. “It’s a plan that not everyone wants. It’s about traditions, the freedom of a boat, family professions.”

The Arctic is warming even faster than other parts of the planet, and the rapidly melting ice is causing alarm among scientists about sea-level rise. In northeastern Greenland, average yearly temperature have risen 4.5 degrees in the past 15 years, and scientists predict the area could warm by 14 to 21 degrees by the end of the century.

Already, winter pack ice that covers the fjords is no longer stable enough for dog sledding and snowmobile traffic in many areas. Winter fishing, essential to feeding families, is becoming hazardous or impossible.

It has long been known that Greenland sat upon vast mineral lodes, and the Danish government has mapped them intermittently for decades. Niels Bohr, Denmark’s Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist and a member of the Manhattan Project, visited Narsaq in 1957 because of its uranium deposits.

But previous attempts at mining mostly failed, proving too expensive in the inclement conditions. Now, warming has altered the equation.

Greenland’s Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum, charged with managing the boom, currently has 150 active licenses for mineral exploration, up from 20 a decade ago. Altogether, companies spent $100 million exploring Greenland’s deposits last year, and several are applying for licenses to begin construction on new mines, bearing gold, iron and zinc and rare earths. There are also foreign companies exploring for offshore oil.

“For me, I wouldn’t mind if the whole ice cap disappears,” said Ole Christiansen, the chief executive of NunamMinerals, Greenland’s largest homegrown mining company, as he picked his way along a proposed gold mining site up the fjord from Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. “As it melts, we’re seeing new places with very attractive geology.”

The Black Angel lead and zinc mine, which closed in 1990, is applying to reopen this year, said Jorgen T. Hammeken-Holm, who oversees licensing at the country’s mining bureau, “because the ice is in retreat and you’re getting much more to explore.”
The Greenlandic government hopes that mining will provide new revenue. In granting Greenland home rule in 2009, Denmark froze its annual subsidy, which is scheduled to be decreased further in the coming years.

But Greenland is also looking to leverage the power afforded by its newfound mineral resources to wield “political influence on issues that matter to us,” said Mr. Frederiksen, the deputy premier.

Many residents say they resent that better-educated Danes tend to run the small country’s few businesses. The government also wants to persuade the European Union to lift its 2009 ban on imports of seal products, which has devastated a crucial business for the Inuit people and resulted in a backlog of 300,000 skins — roughly five for every resident.

Here in Narsaq, a collection of brightly painted homes bordered by spectacular fjords, two foreign companies are applying to the government for permission to mine.

“This is huge; we could be mining this for the next 100 years,” said Eric Sondergaard, a geologist with the Australian-owned company Greenland Minerals and Energy, who was on the outskirts of Narsaq one day recently, picking at rocks on a moon-like plateau rich with an estimated 10.5 million tons of rare earth ore.

That proximity promises employment, and the company is already schooling some young men in drilling and in English, the international language of mine operations. It plans to build a processing plant, a new port and more roads. (Greenland currently has none outside of settled areas.) Narsaq’s tiny airport, previously threatened with closure from lack of traffic, could be expanded. A local landlord is contemplating converting an abandoned apartment block into a hotel.

“There will be a lot of people coming from outside and that will be a big challenge since Greenlandic culture has been isolated,” said Jasper Schroder, a student home in Narsaq from university in Denmark.

Still, he supports the mine and hopes it will provide jobs and stem the rash of suicides, particularly among his peers; Greenland has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. “People in this culture don’t want to be a burden to their families if they can’t contribute,” he said.

But not all are convinced of the benefits of mining. “Of course the mine will help the local economy and will help Greenland, but I’m not so sure if it will be good for us,” said Dorothea Rodgaard, who runs a local guesthouse. “We are worried about the loss of nature.”

Many important political decisions are pending for Greenland’s government. The national labor union wants it to ban the use of low-wage crews from abroad because it does not want local pay scales undermined or jobs lost to foreign workers. But there are not enough native workers to build mines without outside help.

And for development to go forward, the government will have to revise a longstanding “zero tolerance” policy for the mining of radioactive material, an outgrowth of Denmark’s adamantly antinuclear stance. Rare earth metals are nearly always intertwined with some radioactive elements.

Simon Simonsen, the mayor of South Greenland, which includes Narsaq, said that most residents of the area had overcome initial fears and accepted the levels of radioactive material involved.

“If we don’t get this mine,” he said, “Narsaq will just get smaller and smaller.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/24/sc...gewanted=print

[Slimprofits]

Re: The Corporate Media - A Case in Point




http://www.people-press.org/2012/09/...is-vulnerable/