Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Media Outlets Shame Themselves With (lack of) Coverage of Obama Climate Speech

Predicting what our progeny will think is important about our current world may be a fool's game, that is until you consider climate change.  The post-Industrial Revolution carbon dioxide in the atmosphere isn't in a hurry to go anywhere and we continue inject more at an accelerating rate. Greater amounts of heat will be retained by the atmosphere and later generations (emphasis on the plural) will experience changes in weather, ecosystems and civilization. It doesn't require any great predictive powers to believe that our descendants will consider our action, and lack of, to climate change as our most important legacy

That's my guess for the future. As for the present it is obvious that the great and little minds of the media empires rank climate change as not being very newsworthy.  Yesterday, President gave the most frank and forceful speech by any U.S. president on the matter, a speech that also announced significant  concrete executive action. Yet both while he was talking and immediately afterwards CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, Fox and even MSNBC barely covered it, the only exception was the Weather Channel. When I flipped on CNN rather than see the speech or even talking yahoos dissembling it I was transported back to my time in San Diego in the mid-80s because CNN was breathlessly reporting on a car chase on Southern California freeway. The media empires website's were just as negligent. NBCnews.com relegated the speech it to the secondary sidebar items, but at least it was near the top of the page. But that's much better than CBSnews.com where it was buried way down the page in small font, Paula Deen was rated as more newsworthy. An hour later, CNN.com did post the story at the top, along with video. But they had to add a truthinews bit that asked if "Americans care about climate change". Yes, the actual facts only matter to CNN of they think the public cares. Many thanks to Stephen Colbert for coming up with that term just in time. Come to think of it, maybe that is the problem in a nutshell. The importance of an issue to the public and the media who wants their attention is not based on the actually events, risks and facts but on the narcissism of the viewers.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Been Away

From the internet that is. First I was up in Massachusetts and had spotty service, then the hard drive developed the Blue Screen of Death.

But that's not the full story. For I've grown bored and irritated with the internet. It is still useful as an accelerated and interconnected communications device with great resources, but as a place to spend much time "socializing" it is a pathetic world of paranoid libertarian/anarchist fucktwits with little regard to what actually happens on the ground as they say. It's reality TV on steroids (here is where I place the obligatory "I am aware of the irony). That's not to say there aren't real gems there, but the volume of crap is increasing. I have also grown increasingly annoyed at those impressed that they can use gadgets so simple an energetic cattle dog could operate them, the so-called "tech savvy" crowd. And then there are the people who are more freaked out that the metadata for their inane tweets and instagrams may be in an anonymous giant pile than they were over schoolkids getting slaughtered. Get off your pedestal folks, you're nothing more than the latest product of consumer marketing and the volume of crap you post and share will not grant you any sort of immortality. Long story short I needed to get away.

I will post as I find the time, mainly as a way to practice my writing but also as a means of venting. I could care less if anyone reads it, but if they do I thank them.