Max Boykoff and J. Timmons Roberts of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute hit the nail on the head:
“One could summarize ... that the media has at times kept the issue of climate change alive, but has also limited the extent to which real change in the organization of society [has] been called for. To put it plainly, the press has been quite reformist in its portrayal of the needed action on climate change, when the scientific projections suggest the issue may call for truly revolutionary changes. The difficult position of the media in capitalist society is that commercial news outlets require huge amounts of advertising to pay their salaries and other expenses, and the greatest advertisers are for automobiles, real estate, airlines, fast food, and home furnishings. To create demand for real mitigation of climate change emissions would require the media to repeatedly and insistently call for truly revolutionary changes in society, precisely away from consumption of the products of their advertisers.”
Governments can’t act. The media can’t tell the truth. The crisis in which we find ourselves, it becomes clearer by the day, is not simply ecological - it is a crisis of democracy, in which our most vital institutions have been compromised. Fiddling about at the edges - changing a candidate here, a lightbulb there - makes little difference: the tyranny of vested interests remains in control.
26/06/08 @ 20:19