Climate Change: "Welcome to Mars (or North Korea)!" — by Media Lens
Media Lens
January 31, 2006
The Great Media Silence on Causes and Solutions
"One fundamental goal of any well-crafted indoctrination program is to direct attention elsewhere, away from effective power, its roots, and the disguises it assumes." (Noam Chomsky, 'Deterring Democracy', Vintage, 1992, p.303)
Of Realists And Stalinists
The Independent is feeling the heat from public criticism of its adverts pushing foreign travel, cars and endless consumerism. A recent editorial noted:
"Just ponder this as you flick through those holiday brochures and even the travel pages of this newspaper to brighten up the grey January days... Fuelled by cheap flights, the British wanderlust seems far from sated. Fuelled is the operative word here. For the cost of cheap flights may be low in pounds sterling but the cost to the environment is high." ('All these flights abroad could end up costing us the earth', leader, The Independent, January 28, 2006)
It is rare indeed for a paper to even hint at the negative impacts of the advertising it carries.
Over at the Independent on Sunday (IoS), deputy editor Michael Williams dismissed readers protesting the paper's climate-killing adverts as "a curmudgeonly lot of puritans, miseries, killjoys, Stalinists and glooms." (Williams, 'A bottle of bubbly for the best way to fly', Independent on Sunday, January 22, 2006)
It would seem the "Stalinists" who aspire to radical media reform are beyond the pale: "Welcome to Mars (or North Korea)!". Williams refuses to recognise that his paper's heavy reliance on advertising revenue is only one of a series of filters protecting the public from unpalatable truths about power in society.
Click here for the full Media Lens Alert.
January 31, 2006
The Great Media Silence on Causes and Solutions
"One fundamental goal of any well-crafted indoctrination program is to direct attention elsewhere, away from effective power, its roots, and the disguises it assumes." (Noam Chomsky, 'Deterring Democracy', Vintage, 1992, p.303)
Of Realists And Stalinists
The Independent is feeling the heat from public criticism of its adverts pushing foreign travel, cars and endless consumerism. A recent editorial noted:
"Just ponder this as you flick through those holiday brochures and even the travel pages of this newspaper to brighten up the grey January days... Fuelled by cheap flights, the British wanderlust seems far from sated. Fuelled is the operative word here. For the cost of cheap flights may be low in pounds sterling but the cost to the environment is high." ('All these flights abroad could end up costing us the earth', leader, The Independent, January 28, 2006)
It is rare indeed for a paper to even hint at the negative impacts of the advertising it carries.
Over at the Independent on Sunday (IoS), deputy editor Michael Williams dismissed readers protesting the paper's climate-killing adverts as "a curmudgeonly lot of puritans, miseries, killjoys, Stalinists and glooms." (Williams, 'A bottle of bubbly for the best way to fly', Independent on Sunday, January 22, 2006)
It would seem the "Stalinists" who aspire to radical media reform are beyond the pale: "Welcome to Mars (or North Korea)!". Williams refuses to recognise that his paper's heavy reliance on advertising revenue is only one of a series of filters protecting the public from unpalatable truths about power in society.
Click here for the full Media Lens Alert.
posted by Sean M. Madden at
1:23 PM
)
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home