see below
Corporate media helping to bury the climate change issue
Mon, 2011-11-21 11:31
#1
M. Spector
Corporate media helping to bury the climate change issue
Mon, 2011-11-21 11:31
#2
Mon, 2011-11-21 11:46
#3
Northern Shoveler
Manufacturing Consent is still a must read for anyone wanting to understand the basics of the MSM.
CHOMSKY: It's basically an institutional analysis of the major media, what we call a propaganda model. We're talking primarily about the national media, those media that sort of set a general agenda that others more or less adhere to, to the extent that they even pay much attention to national or international affairs.
Now the elite media are sort of the agenda-setting media. That means The New York Times, The Washington Post, the major television channels, and so on. They set the general framework. Local media more or less adapt to their structure.
And they do this in all sorts of ways: by selection of topics, by distribution of concerns, by emphasis and framing of issues, by filtering of information, by bounding of debate within certain limits. They determine, they select, they shape, they control, they restrict -- in order to serve the interests of dominant, elite groups in the society.
The New York Times is certainly the most important newspaper in the United States, and one could argue the most important newspaper in the world. The New York Times plays an enormous role in shaping the perception of the current world on the part of the politically active, educated classes. Also The New York Times has a special role, and I believe its editors probably feel that they bear a heavy burden, in the sense that The New York Times creates history.
That is, history is what appears in The New York Times archives; the place where people will go to find out what happened is The New York Times. Therefore it's extremely important if history is going to be shaped in an appropriate way, that certain things appear, certain things not appear, certain questions be asked, other questions be ignored, and that issues be framed in a particular fashion. Now in whose interests is history being so shaped? Well, I think that's not very difficult to answer.
Now, to eliminate confusion, all of this has nothing to do with liberal or conservative bias. According to the propaganda model, both liberal and conservative wings of the media -- whatever those terms are supposed to mean -- fall within the same framework of assumptions.
In fact, if the system functions well, it ought to have a liberal bias, or at least appear to. Because if it appears to have a liberal bias, that will serve to bound thought even more effectively.
In other words, if the press is indeed adversarial and liberal and all these bad things, then how can I go beyond it? They're already so extreme in their opposition to power that to go beyond it would be to take off from the planet. So therefore it must be that the presuppositions that are accepted in the liberal media are sacrosanct -- can't go beyond them. And a well-functioning system would in fact have a bias of that kind. The media would then serve to say in effect: Thus far and no further.
http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/1992----02.htm
Mon, 2011-11-21 13:33
#4
M. Spector
[url=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/27/jon-stewart-climategate-debunki... Stewart Rips Media For Ignoring "Climategate" Debunking, Covering McRib Instead (VIDEO)[/url]
Mon, 2011-11-21 13:48
#5
M. Spector
As an internal email revealed, Fox News's Washington managing editor Bill Sammon directed Fox journalists in December 2009 to cast doubt on the basic fact that the planet has warmed.
But even before 2009, Fox News was [url=http://mediamatters.org/blog/201111140010]already doing just that[/url]:
A new study confirms that Fox News systematically paints a distorted picture of climate change, with the effect of worsening political polarization. Published by The International Journal Of Press/Politics, the study examined primetime cable news broadcasts from [b]2007[/b] and [b]2008[/b], and found that Fox "discussed climate change most often," but "the tone of its coverage was disproportionately dismissive".
Mon, 2011-11-21 13:56
#6
M. Spector
[url=http://mediamatters.org/blog/201110280023]Earth to CNN: It's Getting Warmer[/url]
Meyers has been misinforming CNN's viewers about climate change for years. It's worth recalling Charles Homans' award winning Columbia Journalism Review article examining the phenomenon of TV weathermen who don't believe in manmade climate change:Most scientists are loath to speak to subjects outside of their own field, and with good reason--you wouldn't expect a dentist to know much about, say, the geological strata of the Grand Canyon. But [b]meteorologists, by virtue of typically being the only people with any science background at their stations, are under the opposite pressure--to be conversant in anything and everything scientific.[/b] This is a good thing if you see yourself as a science communicator, someone who sifts the good information from the bad--but it becomes a problem when you start to see scientific authority springing from your own haphazardly informed intuition, as many of the skeptic weathercasters do.Among the certified meteorologists Wilson surveyed in 2008, 79 percent considered it appropriate to educate their communities about climate change. Few of them, however, had taken the steps necessary to fully educate themselves about it. When asked which source of information on climate change they most trusted, 22 percent named the AMS. But the next most popular answer, with 16 percent, was "no one." The third was "myself."
Mon, 2011-11-21 14:12
#7
Northern Shoveler
[url=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/27/jon-stewart-climategate-debunki... Stewart Rips Media For Ignoring "Climategate" Debunking, Covering McRib Instead (VIDEO)[/url]
That link says I need to be in the US and the YouTube version has been pulled. Got another link?
Mon, 2011-11-21 14:47
#8
M. Spector
Sorry, no. I saw it live on TV and didn't bother to try running the video before posting the link.
Damn copyright nazis!
ETA: If you move very quickly to [url=http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart#clip555... link[/url] on the Canadian Comedy Network, you can, [b]for a very limited time[/b], watch the October 26, 2011 Daily Show (clip 1 of 4) from which the clip was taken.