Appearing on WAMU’s The Kojo Nnamdi Show a couple weeks ago, NPR ombud Alicia Shepard engaged in a practice that’s becoming increasingly popular among media watchers: she talked about Glenn Beck. “When Glenn Beck is on NPR,” she said, “I can be assured there will be a lot of emails. I feel like, ‘Hey you should hear what Glenn Beck has to say. Like it or not, he’s influential.’”
In her ombud column yesterday—in response to a listener’s expression of ‘outrage’ at the Beck comment—Shepard clarified her thinking:
That quote does not indicate that I think Beck should be on NPR every day, nor do I think that sexism, racism or lying have a place on NPR. But if Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs, Sarah Palin or any other prominent conservative firebrand is making headlines, NPR should report that as part of the news — not to promote them but to include when putting news in context.
The same goes for prominent liberals such as MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow….
I’ve said it before, and I will reiterate it. NPR is a mainstream news outlet. Its duty is to inform the public of all that is going on — and that means airing voices and stories that many listeners might not like or agree with.
While we agree with Shepard that outlets like NPR have a duty to report the news, essentially, ‘without fear or favor,” we wonder about the corollary to that claim: that outlets should report about Beck and similar “firebrands” across the political spectrum because they are “part of the news.” News outlets, after all, don’t simply follow the news; they create the news. They determine who and what become stories. Given that, are news outlets really obligated to cover particular figures or stories because they are “making headlines”? How should they balance their obligations both to follow the news and decide it?
As a J-school student, this discussion comes up almost daily. In fact, one my J classes focused on the press leading a debate or reflecting a debate. A pivotal example -- or failure, really -- of the press leading a debate was the late CNN program Crossfire.
When Jon Stewart took on the hosts (Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala), he told them to stop. The co-hosts didn't work toward resolutions with any guest. Rather, they tried to get a rise out of their guests because that -- producers believer -- entertains audiences. Working toward progress or agreements, however, bores viewers. Yet, I'm adamant about being loyal to the citizen. Even if you have to deliver what they need when it isn't what they want, do it.
Lead the debate. If Beck, Limbaugh, et al want to spout their extremist views, fine. But don't counter with an ultra-leftist opinion. Try to find a middle ground. (I must say, that's difficult to do with unreasonable "firebrands," but it can be done with politicians, scholars and other intellectuals).
#1 Posted by Christian, CJR on Wed 4 Nov 2009 at 11:21 PM
Bill Moyers, Rachel Maddow, and to a lesser extent Olberman take their duty to inform the audience accurately seriously. They have a view, but the view doesn't supersede the debate nor does it fill the time and overwhelm the viewer with spectacle, like the ed show and olberman sometimes do. They rely on substance.
Beck, and the menagerie that hoots with him, have the goal of ending debate and using bullying tactics to convince the audience they are right and that their critics are incompetent fools who seek to destroy the country. They do not inform, they perform. They are not newsmen, they are showmen.
People should be careful when they equate the work of a liberal journalists and commentators, like Rachel Maddow and Bill Moyers, to right wing carnival acts.
There's a fundamental difference, the carnies know it's a show, they know it's a lie, and they don't care if they trick the audience so long as they stay in the tent. There is a line between information and disinformation, but you wouldn't know it from today's journalistic institutions.
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 5 Nov 2009 at 01:13 AM
http://www.eschatonblog.com/2009/11/americas-assignment-editor.html
Some days I worry about the future of journalism, then I see that the LA Times pays Jonah Goldberg and see this crap on the teevee. It really can't get any worse, and "real" journalists have long failed to complain. In fact, they spent the last couple of weeks defending Fox.
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 5 Nov 2009 at 03:19 AM
I can't stand to watch more than 5 minutes of Beck, but he is influential and the stories he breaks are factual (believe me, if he makes one factual error there are thousands of lefty bloggers waiting to pounce).
Olberman is a thug, and seeing his billboard-sized visage on the FDR Drive reminds me of 1984 writ large. Actually nobody watches him or Maddow - their audience is 25% that of Fox, so they can be safely ignored. Moyers is the same, just another doctrinaire liberal hack. None of them will give a conservative a chance to air their views - unlike Fox which regularly gives liberals equal time.
Moyers is the worst, a sanctimonious creep who promulgates his dishonest spin with the benefit of my tax dollars.
How would you like to see Limbaugh on a billboard in Manhattan? Or watch government funds go into his pocket? Count yourself lucky, liberals.
#4 Posted by JLD, CJR on Thu 5 Nov 2009 at 10:02 AM
Just recently he broke the story that the tea party protests were 1.7 million
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOmtlfiJeLQ
Which was off by a factor of only 15 or so.
This was after he broke the story that when you take the first letters of Obama, Left, Immigrants, Graft. Acorn, Revolutionaries, and Hidden Agendas, they spell WHARRGARBL.
Tonight on Glen Beck, Breaking News! Serutan is Natures spelled backwards! And natures is just another word for communism, the fascist kind.
Are you serious? You really rub your face in that crap? You're not trolling here?
It's the journalism you deserve in that case.
PS. Olbermann and Maddow have conservatives whenever they want to come on the show and they are treated decently, so long as they return the favor.
http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/msnbc/frum_targets_maddow_for_heavy_sarcasm_and_sneering_97399.asp
And, back in the day, conservative uber troll, Ken Tomlinson, wasted 10,000 of your tax payer dollars doing a hack investigation of Moyers because he wanted to "prove" he was liberally biased. This is the same pbs that wastes your taxpayer dollars funding the conservative morons at McLaughlin Group. You may not like what he reports, but I challenge you to come up with a Beck worthy equivalent to the misinfomrtaion that goes on every day in the conservative circles.
#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 5 Nov 2009 at 01:50 PM
"They determine who and what become stories...."
umm, yes.
So, this instance of an industry lobbyist seeming to be simply a news reporter (most readers won't examine and think about the byline)...is especially significant.
From MCT news service!:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-200911050804mctnewsservbc-aarp-con-mct1084nov0,0,7468640.story
#6 Posted by Hal Horvath, CJR on Thu 5 Nov 2009 at 04:59 PM
If 'the news' is not to be driven by what some particular pundits or groups are talking about, then I'm afraid this judgment will swing in both directions politically. We get a lot of news that is not 'market-driven' in the sense of being important to most people. Two examples that immediately come to mind are environmentalism stories (environmentalism has polled poorly as a concern of voters and consumers for decades) and gay-rights stories.
There is no other explanation for the prominence given these sets of issues except that they are disproportionately important to an urban, affluent demographic, and most national-political journalists live and/or work in urban, affluent neighborhoods. I think one important root of the decades-old antipathy between the Republican Party and its constituencies on one hand vs. the old-line news organizations on the other is best understood as a dispute between urban vs. suburban/rural ideas of what constitutes 'news', with some regional differences also thrown into the mix.
#7 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Fri 6 Nov 2009 at 12:39 PM
Environmentalism has polled poorly?
I think that a question of how the poll phrased the question. In general, people have been environmentally concerned for decades as issues of water quality, natural habitat despoliation, species depletion, pollution, toxicity of food, air quality, uv exposure, acid rain, etc crop up into their lives.
When rivers were burning and great lakes were being overwhelmed with sewage, environmentalism did not poll poorly:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/poisonedwaters/themes/earthday.html
The above is a great doc BTW if you're interested.
#8 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 6 Nov 2009 at 03:10 PM
Thimbles, environmental issues poll poorly in comparison with other issues and have for decades. A quick check of a Pew poll on this topic from January 2009 showed 'environmentalism' rating 16th out of 20 named issues (three spaces behind 'moral decline'). This was at a moment when the Democrats were assuming control of the White House and the outlook for liberal causes was at a fever pitch.
Some polling gives abstract high numbers to eco-issues, but when confronted with a jobs vs. enviro trade-off at the polls, the latter has a record of losing, dating back to the flop 'Big Green' initiative a generation ago in supposedly eco-friendly California.
The reasons are not hard to find; the green lobby and its completely uncritical allies in the press have cried wolf so often that most peoples' eyes glaze over at yet another apocalypse that will consume us miserable sinners unless we change our profligate ways and give more power to liberal Democrats. Plus, frankly, in spite of a political- environmental movement dating back at least to 'Earth Day' in 1970, humble earthlings simply do not see much evidence of the horrors enviro-groups have been predicting all that time. The horrors mainly exist in computer models and haven't materialized quite as predicted. I know, the day of reckoning is coming, etc. Been hearing that one since I was a boy, and I'm no spring chicken.
As for the accuracy of Moyers, Maddow, Olbermann, etc. - well, Maddow did inform me that the Constitution of the United States had no Preamble, which was news to me. When it was read to her, Rachel asserted that it came from the Declaration of Independence. Even I know better than that, and I don't have a cable talk show. Given that liberals invoke the Constitution the way fundamentalists invoke Scripture, i.e., as if they owned the copyright, this is especially . . . piquant. Hope you get your 'information' from a wider variety of sources than the ones you named . . .
#9 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Fri 6 Nov 2009 at 05:21 PM
Seriously? You think everything has been okay with the environment and that that environmentalists are some doom saying cult who don't have the science to back themselves up way more often than not?
Geez.
Let's just forgo the question on whether actions predicated on scientific evidence and prediction should be ignored because the public doesn't think much of the science - much of the reason for that public attitude being the push of public relations firms hired by the businesses with the most to lose from those actions.
Let's go to the report you base your claims on.
A quick check of a Pew poll on this topic from January 2009 showed 'environmentalism' rating 16th out of 20 named issues (three spaces behind 'moral decline').
The actual report:
http://people-press.org/report/485/economy-top-policy-priority
was written in the aftermath of an economic implosion in which the media was claiming the world economy was going to collapse into a second Great Depression and it was taking place in the wake of a bitter election in which health care and spending were the major divisive issues. In the context of economic collapse and bitter partisan warfare we see the 2009 top priorities graph.
The interesting data is below that where they show historical trends and what they say is that in 2001, the environment was a top priority for 63% of poll respondents, which fell sharply for a couple of years for obvious reasons after 2001. In 2006, it bounced back because of post Katrina discussions and increased awareness of environmental imbalance, It stayed near 60% until 2009 where it dropped 15% while improving jobs went up 21% and improving the economy went up 10%. Because the public is somewhat insulated from the problems of bad environmental stewardship for now, unlike the problems of a bad economy or a terrorist attack, the environment drops the quickest in a crisis.
You used the figures in a crisis to infer a historical pattern that doesn't exist. Environmental issues beat "moral decline" 5 years out of eight, usually by a healthy +10 margin. Historically speaking, the environment runs about the same figures as reducing the budget deficit and beats issues of illegal immigration. And this is in spite of hostile media coverage by fox and "balanced" media outlets who give equal time to outlying hacks like Richard Lindzen. Cjr has written much on the issue of false balance.
So you made an egregious mistake, sort of like what Rachael Maddow did when she said "the constitution doesn't have a preamble" instead of "the constitution doesn't have that preamble". It doesn't change the fact that Bonehead got it wrong, nor the fact that his alternative to the democratic health care proposal worth revolting about is one that is more expensive and covers less people.
And, in spite of that, I have no doubt Rachael will apologize for her trivial error because, to her and the commentators / journalists like her, her first duty is to properly informing her audience and winning rhetorical contests comes second.
You will rarely find that the case at Fox and by the conservatives like Fox.
Not even "respectable" George Will can admit a mistake without a fight:
http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/the_george_will_affair.php
#10 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 7 Nov 2009 at 11:24 AM
Wow, that was quick.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rme34Dh0Wk4
#11 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 7 Nov 2009 at 11:56 AM
Not everything that comes out of the mouth of Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, or any other commentator is news. NPR does not need to report their views on their show because they aren't necessary. They are only voices who report on the news but do not create news. They only stir up things, that's all. qwest customer service
#12 Posted by James Qwest, CJR on Sat 7 Nov 2009 at 10:03 PM
Thimbles, only time for a quick response - this is a lunchtime activity for me as a general rule - but I can't recall ever an election even at the state level turning on environmental issues. The January 2009 Pew poll included a lot of things besides the ailing economy as possible priorities. The amount of coverage given vs. the actual importance of this issue to voters and consumers just seems disproportionate to me.
At any given time in the past couple of hundred years, since the industrial revolution, I expect that there has been an 'environmental crisis' in the eyes of a certain kind of person. At least since Blake's 'dark satanic mills' and landowners complaining in the British parliament that further expansion of industry would interfere with their wild pheasants and geese. Or Thoreau trying to rough it down at Walden Pond. These issues turns as much on upper-class aesthetics as on 'science'. The enviros cannot exactly explain why this was not a big issue when there actually were 'killer fogs' and such in London, UK, and Donora, Pa., but became a big issue to the children of affluence in the wake of the cultural upheaval of the 1960s. The enviros refuse to give a coherent account of the timeline of 'environmentalism', to acknowledge the clear social-class basis of the degree of concern about this issue, and the legitimate reasons that the public remains skeptical of apocalyptic predictions - starting with the uncritical press treatment I noted above.
Of course, when all else fails, you can always blame Fox News.
#13 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Mon 9 Nov 2009 at 12:24 PM
The class basis you suggest is toward upper, monied, class environmental exploitation and waste product externalization. People with money by property and extract what they can from it to make more money and they leave the toxic barrels behind them.
And much of the reason why it wasn't a big deal, or at least recorded as a big deal, is that it takes an educated middle class to have enough basic knowledge of science to understand the issue and enough clout to make it an issue.
You can be sure the Native Americans worried about their environment when the Europeans depopulated the buffalo and contaminated drinking water supplies, but until the 1960's, no body gave a damn about Indians unless it was to express their preference for dead ones.
People now know about things like the effects of lead on the body, which is why they brought pressure to remove it as a fuel additive. People now know about DDT and how poisons can move up the food chain, which is why it's now banned. People know about the ozone hole caused by CFCs, which is why we phased out production.
Science discovers a problem, people react to the discovery and solve the problem, conservatives, who hate science when it gets in the way of rapicious exploitation, claim there was no problem to begin with. By solving the problem, you've disproved there ever was a problem, to conservatives. You are just a big old doomsayer.
But no. The real problem is we've got people who think problems should be ranked by their public popularity. And why is that a problem? Because there are many dead civilizations throughout time who refused to look at real problems and spent their time dealing with problems that existed mainly in public perception. They believed Huitzilopochtli was the major issue which could only be solved by more human sacrifices.
You know what killed them? Deforestation. The Environment. It's happened over and over again, we kill the golden goose of our environment and then we starve. That's what the archeological science tells us:
http://blog.ted.com/2008/10/why_do_societie.php
and if we ignore what is happening to our environment now, our global civilization could well be f*cked. You say it's doom saying and that it couldn't happened, I say it has happened, many times, to civilizations who thought they could never collapse and did because they persisted in the dumb habits which doomed them.
We are at that stage and only discoveries in oil based technology , made in the 1960's, has postponed the reckoning, but it hasn't canceled it. It's tied our civilization to a non-renewable resource who's waste fills our fields, oceans, and bodies.
Chemical agriculture requires more chemicals constantly because we are burning out the natural resources of our soil. If we start running low on oil while climate change is wrecking our seasonal growth and disrupting the flow of water resources, that could be it. We don't have food for our global system, nor the fuel to transport it, we starve.
Don't the stakes of the story make it more newsworthy than "dealing with moral breakdown"?
#14 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 10 Nov 2009 at 12:06 PM
Thimbles, my interpretation of the motive of environmentalism is less sentimental than yours, obviously. I always bet on self-interest, even if it is dressed up in fine language. Environmentalists are drawn from the ranks of the upper classes because the latter, having made their piles, now seek to fix the status quo and limit upward mobility based on competition in the marketplace. Sometimes they kid themselves about their prime motives - this used to be common when the elites used religion to try to maintain their status.
The movement reeks of hypocrisy; one thinks of Sen. Kennedy's opposition to wind farms off the coast of Martha's Vineyard ("But that's where I sail!") or Barbra Streisand's opposition to photography of the Pacific coast in her Malibu neighborhood in order to monitor soil erosion. And these are just a couple of famous examples off the top of my head.
Indians? Odd insertion. John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, etc., were influential people before the 1960s, but the mass of a democratic electorate was too busy mining coal or sewing clothing and trying to make the lives of their children easier than theirs had been to get real sentimental about nature - which had been the enemy of rural-dwellers until the Industrial Revolution started to give ordinary people a margin of wealth and leisure available previously only to the landed gentry. I object to the white-liberal stereotyping of 'Indians'. History shows that intra-tribal conflict was as strong as wariness of the whites. You yourself cite an Aztec practice as an example of what to avoid, not an example from the industrial era of the West.
I'm afraid your comment about an 'educated middle class' is the explanation that has always been given for special priority for the interests of the upper classes. It is mass consumption that is the enemy of the environmental movement, a classic upper-class attitude. They reserve their contempt 'McMansions', but not actual mansions; for SUV's, not limousines. (Arianna Huffington was ostentatious about driving a Prius, but she would take private jets to Washington as part of her busy schedule; one private jet trip cross-country uses as much fuel as an SUV does for a year.) McMansions and SUV's are an expression of bourgeois prosperity on a mass scale. The most characteristic snobbishness of old money is toward 'new money' and 'parvenus' without taste, you see, and not against actual poor people - whom rich liberals love as long as they don't actually become middle-class strivers. Upper class liberals poured all kinds of compassion on the Okies back in the day, but when those folks became the religious conservatives of California's churchy Central Valley, they became The Enemy, a threat.
Your post confirms my perception that enviros also have a lot in common with Old Testament prophets. I'm sorry to seem complacent, but over time, and especially since the Industrial Revolution, life on earth has generally improved. What remains are technical challenges more than they are moral-political ones. As ever.
#15 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Tue 10 Nov 2009 at 12:36 PM
Quote: "Environmentalists are drawn from the ranks of the upper classes"
Got any data for that? It seems like an awful lot of middle class housewives, college students, retirees and others are part of that movement.
#16 Posted by garhighway, CJR on Tue 10 Nov 2009 at 01:29 PM
Don't have time just now to research enough hard numbers to satisfy some. However, I Googled the words 'environmental', 'movement', 'income', 'level' and 'class' quickly. The first three entries were as follows:
A thesis in which 'The environmental movement is traced through its origins as an upper-class movement' . . .
A left-wing article deploring the 'lack of diversity' in the environmental movement, which summarizes its finding that 'Environmental political issues, as conventionally presented, are often a higher priority for White Americans in the higher income brackets with college degrees than minority groups' . . .
And another blog discussion whose question is 'Why do environmentalists have such a hard time attracting low-income people into their movement?' . . .
These were the first three entries - and all from left-wing, rather than right-wing sources. Possibly not the degree of proof to convince the ideologically militant, but suggestive.
Add to it the admiring Profile by the The New Yorker of Van Jones, lately encouraged to find other work by the Administration, which states that 'A 2006 study by Earthjustice, a non-profit environmental law group, found that the "ecological base" - defined as Americans who report the environment as being central to their concerns - is "nearly ninety percent white, mostly college-educated, higher income, and over thirty-five'.
Housewifery has become a luxury of the affluent; women whose husbands draw a lawyer's pay or something. Similarly with retirees; in American, ownership of wealth is directly correlated with age. College students, same story - they are not drawn proportionately from lower income groups.
#17 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Tue 10 Nov 2009 at 05:25 PM
You Googled it?!
Enough said.
#18 Posted by garhighway, CJR on Wed 11 Nov 2009 at 08:18 AM
To garhighway, if the quote from The New Yorker article (which came from Googling The New Yorker) is false, I'm sure we would all like to see your correction. I find a lot of Google links given by your side, BTW. I expect you accept those.
For further evidence that this is a top-down issue pushed by the affluent . . .
NEW YORK – NBC gives new meaning to the phrase "green screen" next week, spreading a pro-environmental message across five of its prime-time entertainment programs.
"30 Rock," where Al Gore takes a cameo role, leads the way. Environmental themes were also added to the scripts of "The Biggest Loser," "The Office," "Heroes" and "Community."
NBC Universal's three-year "green" campaign has largely focused on off-camera issues like making company facilities more eco-friendly. News and information programs have also been enlisted to do stories on environmental issues, but except for one "30 Rock" episode two years ago, the campaign hasn't touched the prime-time lineup.
This year on "30 Rock," corporate boss Jack Donaghy tells the late-night show's staff it has to cut its carbon footprint by 5 percent, and puts Kenneth the Page in charge of getting it done.
"It's something that is relatable and is something that a lot of people are doing," said Jack McBrayer, the actor who portrays Kenneth.
Backstage, the show has done its part by removing water bottles in favor of water filters and using chemical-free cleaning products. The show rents hybrid vehicles to transport its actors and crew members, said Beth Colleton, vice president of the "Green is Universal" campaign.
"Everybody is on board with greening up the place and being more environmentally-friendly in real life," McBrayer said. "Every now and then people need to be reminded of things that can be done."
In the comedy "Community," the college is renamed "Environdale." College students think they're hiring the band Green Day for a gig, and instead gets the Celtic combo Greene Daeye. Dwight in "The Office" takes the role of "Recyclops" in that comedy. "Heroes" features cast members filling a truck with recyclables and talking about the importance of giving back to the earth.
Trainers on "The Biggest Loser" will instruct their clients to buy organic produce and bring their own mugs to the coffee shop.
Colleton said there was no attempt to be heavy-handed and interfere with the creative process.
"We make sure we don't dictate to the show," she said. Producers decide the best way to absorb the message in a way that's appropriate for their audiences, she said.
NBC News is also involved next week. The "Today" show will have a series on cost-efficient ways for families to live greener lives. Anne Thompson will do environmental stories from Greenland, Denmark and Arizona on "Nightly News," and David Gregory will bring up the topic on "Meet the Press."
Activities on NBC Universal's cable properties include hosts on The Weather Channel advising viewers to turn down their thermostats.
Green screens, by the way, are blank screens on news sets upon which video or maps are projected.
#19 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Wed 11 Nov 2009 at 12:52 PM
I always bet on self-interest, even if it is dressed up in fine language.
And if you really did, you'd be an environmentalist. People who do not want to eat toxic garbage and live in disrupted, depleted ecologies are self interested. They value a stable world. There should be nothing wrong with people who want to pursue their self interest at their own and society's expense, if you measure expense by more expensive-yet safer-products and less revenue generating-but more productive-forests, especially since conservatives don't seem to mind when the John Galt types pursue their interests at the expense of the community and society around them by cutting down those forests (so that the soil erodes into the sea) and passing off the costs of the cancer their products cause.
Environmentalism is a legitimate expression of self interest since it is in the interest of our survival to seek a sustainable future where our role as human beings is less the simpleminded consumer, swallowing anything put before us in a box wrapped in plastic with a brandname, and more the aware caretaker, seeking ways to engage the world around him to his benefit and the benefit of his children. Why is such a view such a damned anathema to some?
The movement reeks of hypocrisy; one thinks of Sen. Kennedy's opposition to wind farms off the coast of Martha's Vineyard ("But that's where I sail!") or Barbra Streisand's opposition to photography of the Pacific coast in her Malibu neighborhood in order to monitor soil erosion. And these are just a couple of famous examples off the top of my head.
Look, I know you want to define and dismiss an entire movement as a bunch of rich elitist hippy types who want to preserve the environment they live in so that they aren't forced to change their behavior because of the resource depletion they've contributed to, but that's total crap. I can define the Christian church and the social conservative movement as a bunch of hypocritical sexual deviants and I would assume you'd object on good grounds. Well there are dumb ass elitist hypocrites who wage environmental campaigns while traveling back and forth to their houses on opposite coasts, like Ms ex-Larry David, but those idiots do not define the movement.
The movement is defined by people who's children died in cancer clusters around Anniston Alabama
http://www.ewg.org/node/14319
By the Inuit who's way of life is wasting away with the ice it once took root on.
Link removed
By people who want the choice to produce free energy, by sticking a windmill on their house, instead of using energy likely created by dirty means.
Link removed
The movement is defined by people who see their world as something valuable and worth preserving, and are willing to sacrifice to preserve it. They see the value of living in a world where there is nothing to fear from breathing the air, drinking the water, and eating the food. These things are not accorded value by conservatives and their economics.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbcWUoIqX6g (first part of a great 3 part doc)
And they should be. You want to define environmentalism as an issue ranking low on a poll - and therefore unimportant. You want to claim that it's the recipient of attention because wealthy elites want to pull up draw bridges behind them to prevent the rubes from climbing into their castles. You want to say "Oh, historically speaking the environment is a limp wristed poets' cause. Sentimental garbage written by people who spent too much time wandering lonely as a cloud."
You're wrong. The people who are serious environmentalists are driven by the science and upset by its implications. They are the people who've lived through their land ravaged by the needs of a consumerist society wh
#20 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 11 Nov 2009 at 01:23 PM
Well, jeez, Thimbles, you really know how to hurt a guy. BTW, I don't listen to Rush.
Otherwise, your dissertation confirms for me that political outlook is the cause, rather than the effect, of attitudes toward environmentalism. I'm glad you agree that some Hollywood greenies are hypocritical. We will have to disagree as to just how much the movement is a function of the interests (in maintaining social status and access to resources) of these people. There are certainly earnest workers in the vineyards of the environmental movement. But that's true of all groups. An earlier generation of street-level 'progressives' thought they were working for a better world, when in fact they were working for a primitive Russian nationalism. More recently earnest academics thought they were working for Third World liberation; now it looks as though what they were working for was the emergence of the most reactionary form of religious belief and action on earth. Sometimes the people on the ground are being played for suckers.
Per Manifest Destiny, etc., I will concede that it is a pity that the world is a competitive place that has featured killing on a mass scale. Rather than divide it into evil winners and noble losers, I tend to think that, given more or less the same chances, the first immigrants to the American continent from Asia were as ruthless and acquisitive as the Europeans who followed; they themselves didn't exactly emigrate from Asia because they were contented with the resources available back in the old country. Intra-tribal warfare suggests territoriality there, too. The Europeans were simply more technologically advanced, enabling them to be rapacious as everyone else, but on a larger scale. It's the fallacy of equating victimhood with nobility. The mass-murderous activities of the Aztec civilizations suggest that the 'indigenous' peoples (i.e., earliest immigrants to a vacant continnt) of pre-Columbian America were at least as unsentimental about human life as the Manifestly Destined, if crossed. Perhaps the world is a Hobbesian one of endless competition for resources, and the only difference between victimizer and victim is opportunity and skill - not 'morality'? It's not an attractive view, dates at least back to Hobbes I think, but it does have a lot of empirical support - look at the globe, and see how many victims turn into victimizers when given the means to do so. The worst genocides of my adult lifetime have been carried out by (a) Cambodians against their fellow-countrymen, and (b) African Hutus against African Tutsis. Being 'victims' of earlier colonialism didn't exactly produce nobility. As soon as the British left the Indian subcontinent in 1947, Hindus and Moslems resumed killing each other in large numbers. Only Westerners express much guilt about their own ancestors' bad behavior.
I don't believe, as a generalization, in the moral hierarchy of groups of peoples that is a function of the world-view you express, and which appears to have a lot to do with your views on environmentalism. The view starts with a hostile interpretation of American history to which you are certainly entitled. But I believe this outlook drives everything else, including your perception of 'environmental' threats to the globe. My skepticism about current environmentalism is that it comes with a political program that pre-dates the climate-change 'crisis'. Since the modern environmental movement came into being as a result of the cultural and social movements associated with the 1960s, every 'environmental' cause, some of them contradictory to each other (the world is running out of oil vs. the world is producing too many fossil fuels, etc.), has been promoted with the same political program accompanying it - give an aspiring administrative class more control over mass production and consumption. The words change, but the music has always been the same.
It's too bad you are
#21 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Wed 11 Nov 2009 at 05:54 PM
A person is not a sucker if they are persuaded by the weight scientific evidence.
And I assigned no moral meaning to the native American genocide, I just mentioned that one of their incentives for their war against the European invaders was the corruption of the environment they lived upon. Now whether you find anything amoral about a side who takes land and resources based on negotiated treaties (heavily weighted in favor of the Europeans) and then violates those treaties because there are things of value on the parcels of land the negotiated retained is up to you. It's true that barbarism is not unique occurrence within the body of human societies, but American defined itself as a nation where all men are created equal, therefore as a society it defined itself as being better than its predecessors.
Are you of the school that America should not hold itself to the higher standards of its ideals?
And what reasoning are you using to say that the statements "a supply of a resource is dwindling" and "waste from a resource is saturating" are contradictory.
Oil supply is running low and the cost of extraction is going up. Look at the Calgary tar sands.
Oil produces waste and the waste is clogging our environment. Look at the plastic gyres in our oceans and the CO2 levels in our atmosphere.
There is no contradiction except for the ones you invent.
It's like saying a car that has an empty gas tank while the muffler has dropped on the road behind it is a contradiction. You can't have both problems. Unthinkable!
It's unthinkable to a person who has a sentimental attachment to his old car and won't face the reality that changes are necessary.
The old system is breaking down. That's the science. Say whatever you like about the 60's but it's not going to lower the increasing cost of oil extraction, nor will it stop the glaciers of Greenland melting into the ocean. You have a sentimental attachment to the simple times of Consumerist American dominance of the 1950's, but your attachment to those times have lasted long past its expiry date.
You have three kids. Time to grow up and face the world as it is, not how you pretend it to be,
#22 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 11 Nov 2009 at 10:37 PM
We've reached an impasse. I'm an engineer, so I am not unfamiliar with the science and math of the argument that (a) humans are causing global warming, (b) politicians can change the climate by passing laws against humans who want to improve their material status. (Which won't affect those who are already 'haves' - only those uppity 'striver' types.) Being an engineer (who was tested on environmental engineering as part of licensing) doesn't make me a climate change expert - although I have had occasion to ask tough questions of a couple of polar researchers in Al Gore's braintrust, and received very equivocal and hedged answers. It does make me the type of informed consumer who is skeptical of the political program of the climate-control campaign, and whose skepticism has grown, rather than shrunk, with the continuation of this debate.
Avoiding reality to me consists of thinking that passing laws against mass production and consumption have any real impact. There is no way that China and India will stop building new power plants, for instance, over this issue. There is no way that poorer nations aspiring to get richer will see this as anything else but a ploy to keep their citizens from sharing in the world's wealth along with the weary white West. There is nothing politicians can do about the effect of solar activity on the earth's climate, or about the greenhouse effects generated by wetlands, animal methane emissions, spontaneous forest fires and volcanos. Lambasting '1950s consumerism' gives away the cultural hatred and the aesthetic distaste of vulgar mass consumption that is the real motive of enviros - vulgar mass consumption always having been a hobbyhorse of the upper classes, whose dominance of this movement is not doubted even by left-wing activists. (Hmm, why '1950s' consumerism? The saintly 1960s were pretty consumerist, too. Some people's cultural references are getting liver spots on them; a lot has happened in the world since Kennedys and Kings strode the earth, but the 1968 vocabulary of our friends on the Left hasn't changed.) The very symbol of the crusade, Al Gore, stands to build up a considerable financial empire if global warming laws mandating the use of some products is enacted. But I'm still supposed to believe there is no self-interested parties financing and motivating government mandates to 'combat' climate change.
The UN and environmental institutions have a long history of predicting apocalypse for self-interested reasons, too. If I'm a climate scientist, I have an incentive to sex up my research models to show how important it is, in those grant applications. Somehow the apocalypse never arrives - something you don't really dispute. The scope and causes of the danger are in hot dispute among scientists, contrary to the assertions of popular information outlets; now the global-warming lobby is scrambling to explain why the past decade has been one of the cooler ones on record, contrary to their earlier model-driven predictions. This issue and its 'solutions' are mainly driven by politics, not science as such. Sometimes you just have 'conditions' - which can always be re-characterized as 'crises', crisis being the crack cocaine of political activists.
Finally, yes, there is a logical disconnect between asserting that (a) the world is running out of natural resources, with a five-year supply of oil left, etc., as was often argued in the 1970s, and (b) automobile fuel consumption as symbolized by the hated SUV is on a track to generate fossil fuels in such volume as to single-handedly warm the earth. If the world is running out of oil, then fuel usage is not a long-term problem, since the price will rise and consumption will decline as people switch to less-pollutive alternatives. Enviros (Amory Lovins honorably excepted) seem to know nothing about how resources are priced.
As I say, I think we have reached an impasse, and I don't want to r
#23 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Thu 12 Nov 2009 at 12:56 PM
My comment about 1950's consumerism gives away nothing but my awareness that the view of the world, and the consumer in it, was one of no limits. There was no limit to the amount of energy and resources one could use except what one had in one's pocket. There was no limit to what one could excrete since there was always somewhere remote and vast one could dump it.
And I would not have brought it up were you not so fascinated by the dirty hippy, left wing, elitism coming from the evil 1960's which discredits anything the environmental movement is about today.
But back to my point, in the 1950's mind the world was an infinite resource which had no bounds on what humans could extract and dispose without effect.
That is a dead view. It caught fire with the rivers that burned up in the 1970's and eighties and, though you see the embers of the old ideas lying around, the major idea that we can continue eating the best of the planet and dumping the worst without consequence is dead. We know now that there are consequences, minus the few dead embers who refuse to acknowledge them, so now we now have a choice, do we change our behavior because of the consequences or do we face the consequences?
Changing our behavior is expensive so many people don't want to do it, but surviving in a world where it's riches are extracted and the systems we depend upon are disruptive is also expensive. We have developed a deleterious adaptation for oil consumption which, unlike many creatures in the animal kingdom, we can modify before we are culled by natural processes.
But modification is hard. Expensive. Unthinkable. You claim that it is unthinkable that other countries will arrest their progress based on fossil fuel technology and thus the whole excercise is pointless. You may be right, maybe other countries won't arrest their progress on old technology, maybe we won't develop and produce new technology to progress upon, maybe it's hopeless.
But the exercise has a point. We don't know if we don't try. If giving up was a part of the human equation we would have died with spears in our frozen clasped hands as the glaciers covered our bodies. We would have left twigs in our dessicated bodies as we surrendered ourselves to fatal fate in the droughts of Africa.
We are facing a crisis of survival in which our own actions pose the danger. If we choose not to try, then we deserve to die.
But I won't give up as easily on the future as you do.
#24 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 14 Nov 2009 at 01:17 AM
PS. If you're the engineer, why am I doing all the talking about science and you're doing all the talking about politics, academic conspiracies, and elitist narratives about environmentalists being reverse robin hoods?
For someone who claims to have a scientific background, I would think you'd want to argue your skepticism based on science, not on what's popular in the latest poll.
#25 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 14 Nov 2009 at 01:29 AM
I shouldn't take this bait, but . . . sigh . . . this is a journalism review, not a scientific forum. My original point, way back when, was that environmental issues are much more important to journalists than to consumers of journalism, and that this was driven by politics. I've had occasion to cite backup of this view, most recently in Pew's Jan. 2009 poll of voter priorities. (We'll see if NBC gets a ratings bump from General Electric's mandated 'Green Week' theme ordered up for its entertainment and news programs.) You briefly made excuses for the poor showing of 'environmentalism', then changed the subject to environmentalism itself, rather than press coverage of it.
If you are unable to concede that environmental concerns are way down on the list of priorities of voters, then my original point that the press has over-hyped environmental threats for decades is off the table. The 'you bring your scientists and I'll bring mine' contest isn't going to change any minds here. The best predictor of attitude toward this issue is political orientation, not familiarity with the scientific method and the history of predictive models.
#26 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Mon 16 Nov 2009 at 04:53 PM
I shouldn't take this bait, but . . . sigh . . . this is a journalism review, not a scientific forum. My original point, way back when, was that environmental issues are much more important to journalists than to consumers of journalism, and that this was driven by politics. I've had occasion to cite backup of this view, most recently in Pew's Jan. 2009 poll of voter priorities. (We'll see if NBC gets a ratings bump from General Electric's mandated 'Green Week' theme ordered up for its entertainment and news programs.) You briefly made excuses for the poor showing of 'environmentalism', then changed the subject to environmentalism itself, rather than press coverage of it.
If you are unable to concede that environmental concerns are way down on the list of priorities of voters, then my original point that the press has over-hyped environmental threats for decades is off the table. The 'you bring your scientists and I'll bring mine' contest isn't going to change any minds here. The best predictor of attitude toward this issue is political orientation, not familiarity with the scientific method and the history of predictive models.
#27 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Mon 16 Nov 2009 at 04:53 PM
My original point, way back when, was that environmental issues are much more important to journalists than to consumers of journalism, and that this was driven by politics. I've had occasion to cite backup of this view, most recently in Pew's Jan. 2009 poll of voter priorities
Yeah, I showed you were wrong based on that poll. Your claim is sort of like the guy who claims an accident victim doesn't care about his teeth because he hasn't seen a dentist ever since his coma.
There have been two big accidents since 2000. Stop making claims you should know are false.
The reasons behind any environmental priorities are science and conservation.
The desire for conservation is the frequent impetus behind local priorities, the desire for action based on scientific evidence is the impetus for global ones.
If you claim environmentalism is a public low priority, then you are claiming the public vests no credibility in the science upon which the priority rests.
And that forces one to ask two questions:
1) Does the public not believe in the science?
2) Is disbelief warranted?
These are separate questions. I'll see if I coded this table right:
Science is credibleScience is not creiblePublic believes itABPublic doesn't believe itCD
#28 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 16 Nov 2009 at 09:52 PM
Nope, cjr doesn't let me do table tags. >:(
I'll do my best without. First scenario:
A) The Science is credible and the public believes it. Environmentalism is a worthy high priority taken seriously by the public for legitimate reasons.
B) The Science is not credible and the public believes it. Environmentalism isn't a worthy high priority but the public has the hysterical misperception that it is.
C) The Science is credible and the public does not believe it. Environmentalism is an unwarranted low priority. The science indicates it should be taken seriously but the public rejects scientific evidence for reasons to be determined.
D) The science is not credible and the public does not believe it. The science is a low priority because the public has seen the evidence, accurately evaluated the evidence, and determined it to be junk science.
Because you claim environmentalism is a low priority, for you either C or D are valid.
Because I claim that the science is valid. for me either A or C is valid, though my true belief is a more fuzzy in between A and C.
So my question to you is are you a C person or a D person, because if you are a D person, we have to argue about the science.
(In truth we could ask a third question, "Does the public believe the environment is an immediate danger?", but that would have lead to a third axis on the logic table making a logic cube which is much too complex to render on cjr. However, the scenario that "The Science is credible and the public believes it but the public perceives it to be a faraway problem." is a valid case for a low priority since the perception exists that the environmental change is slow and that action based on credible scientific evidence can be put off until later. The dilemma of the procrastinator society.)
#29 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 16 Nov 2009 at 10:36 PM