WHO IS AFRAID OF THE NEW YORK TIMES,
NEW YORK TIMES, NEW YORK TIMES
Me.
Why does the NYT provide absolutely no perspective on climate change?
Rhetorical, I know, as these cads rather devote themselves to propaganda and political assassination. I dropped my subscription after its 2006 Clinton hit piece proving that Bill can't be screwing Hill. But I digress.
One week the NYT runs a map like this one, reflecting what disappears as ocean levels rise one to fourteen meters. This week we're served a puffball piece intimating that (a) climate change is a military problem; (b) our military is all over it, and - most heinously - (c) the United States itself will suffer no physical impacts.
The planet will melt, while we watch unscathed from our observation deck. The world is on our plasma screen. TiVo the apocalypse, would you: I have plans tonight.
Displaced Bangladeshis fleeing into India to escape rising water and famine? How about refugees from NYC, Houston, the Bay Area, Florida? No mention that U.S. coastal cities are petrified, and scrambling for (ineffectual) solutions. No mention of uninhabitability long before water is in the street, due to storm surge and salt-water contamination of aquifers.
Some might say that an educated reader can remember prior content and provide her/his own perspective. Right, just as people easily embrace the inevitability of their individual deaths.
In 2007, the Chicago Humanities Festival devoted its entire line-up of lectures to climate change. Surrounded by sane-looking folk and hearing an entirely-credible and searing summary by Elizabeth Kolbert, I felt hope.
Then came the questions. Most people wanted to be assured that the darkness of nihil will fall only post-them, and their interim responsibility extended no further than lightbulbs. One woman - I would not lie - boomed: "I am a high school science teacher. How can I interest students in this material? They don't care about coral reefs."
I since have adopted four new guidelines.
1. Talk to at least one person each day about climate change. Argue, deny, roll your eyes; I'm tough.
2. Give away as many copies as I can of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, and relentlessly importune people to read it. Ten bucks buys you a terse, brilliant summary of the science and what it means. Boiled down: climate scientists don't understand why you aren't wet with fear, because they are.
3. As the world is ending, I drink only good wine.
4. When rebutting in a public forum, do not grab the microphone until voice has stopped shaking in anger.
HERR KEPLER'S NOTEBOOK
Time is the bully anchor of the opposing tug-rope team.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
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"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
-------------------------------------
"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
I long ago stopped being able to read *any* daily journalism. This is an egregious example, but it's all basically like that. (And of course, the Times is still better than most.) Such journalism as I still read is monthly (it was such a blow to me when the Atlantic was taken over by pod people, and started to publish people such as Dinesh D'Souza -- is his name? A driveling mindless neocon, anyway.) Or books. There's plenty of good books, and they get them out in a pretty timely fashion. I glance at the headlines to see if I can expect to be alive tomorrow, but that's about it. There's not much in the world that I need daily updates on. What I need is good solid researched information in context, and that's what you don't get from daily journalism, even if it's "good."
ReplyDeleteResearched information in context: the very notion! Somewhere, Lynne Cheney smokes like a fumarole.
ReplyDeleteAs a former aspiring journalist, I must both shudder and agree with you. But save a nice thought for The Nation, amazingly a weekly. Scahill's work on Blackwater and our adoption of mercenaries, for example, has been investigatory journalism at its best.
The loss of The Atlantic indeed has been heartbreaking. With its glitzy appearance and vile content, tis now a poisoned chocolate truffle.
I took the Nation for a long time. Finally Alexander Cockburn exasperated me one time too many, and I had to quit. This was just before the first Gulf War, when he was solemnly projecting a hundred thousand American casualties. What? In open terrain, with complete air-superiority? I suddenly realized how often the man must be completely talking through his hat, and it seriously demoralized me. He was so convincing. Sigh.
ReplyDelete