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<address class="entry-title"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.medialens.org/2020/six-months-to-avert-climate-crisis-climate-breakdown-and-the-corporate-media/">https://www.medialens.org/2020/six-months-to-avert-climate-crisis-climate-breakdown-and-the-corporate-media/</a><br>
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<h1 class="entry-title">‘Six Months To Avert Climate Crisis’: <br>
Climate Breakdown And The Corporate Media</h1>
<div class="mh-meta entry-meta"> <span class="entry-meta-date
updated">23rd June 2020</span> <span
class="entry-meta-categories">Alerts</span> </div>
</header>
<figure class="entry-thumbnail"> <img
src="https://www.medialens.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Girl-with-face-paint-of-planet-small-678x381.jpg"
alt="" title="Girl with face paint of planet small"> </figure>
<p>In his classic science fiction novel, ‘Foundation’, Isaac Asimov
posited a future in which ‘psychohistorians’ could predict
outcomes based on past history and the large-scale behaviour of
human populations by combining psychology and the mathematics of
probability. Using ‘psychohistory’, the protagonist Hari Seldon
discovers that the 12,000-year-old Galactic Empire will collapse
in 500 years. He warns the galactic rulers of this likely fate,
while explaining that an alternative future in which human
knowledge is preserved can be attained. For his trouble, he is
exiled to the remote planet of Terminus.</p>
<p>In today’s world, the prospects for human civilisation, never
mind the existence of historians in the future, look bleak indeed.
According to many leading climate scientists and biologists, the
most likely outcome for humanity is the collapse of what is called
‘civilisation’. They warn that it may already be too late to
change course.</p>
<p>These are the shocking expert conclusions, rooted in scientific
evidence and careful rational arguments, which are routinely
underplayed, marginalised or simply ignored by ‘mainstream’ news
media.</p>
<p>Last November, the world’s most prestigious science journal, <em>Nature</em>,
published a study by eminent climate scientists warning that nine
major ‘tipping points’ which regulate global climate stability are
dangerously close to being triggered. These include the slowing
down of ocean circulation in the North Atlantic, massive
deforestation of the Amazon, and accelerating ice loss from the
West Antarctic ice sheet. Any one of these nine tipping points, if
exceeded, could push the Earth’s climate into catastrophic runaway
global warming. There could even be a ‘domino effect’ whereby one
tipping point triggers another tipping point which, in turn,
triggers the next one and so on, in a devastating cascade.</p>
<p>Given the normal custom of academics to use sober language, the
warning statements in the pages of <em>Nature</em> were stark:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘The growing threat of abrupt and irreversible climate changes
must <strong>compel</strong> [our emphasis] political and
economic action on emissions.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The researchers are clear that:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘we are in a climate emergency and [our study of tipping
points] strengthens this year’s chorus of calls for urgent
climate action — from schoolchildren to scientists, cities and
countries.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In short, there is ‘an existential threat to civilization’ and
‘no amount of economic cost–benefit analysis is going to help us.’</p>
<p>This should have dwarfed news coverage of Brexit for months.</p>
<p>One of the study’s co-authors, Will Stefen, emeritus professor of
climate and Earth System science at the Australian National
University, told <em>Voice of Action</em>, an Australian
publication, that all this raises the ultimate question:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘Have we already lost control of the system? Is collapse now
inevitable?’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In other words, there may simply not be enough time to stop
tipping points being reached, as he explained with this metaphor:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘If the Titanic realises that it’s in trouble and it has about
5km that it needs to slow and steer the ship, but it’s only 3km
away from the iceberg, it’s already doomed.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We searched the ProQuest media database for mentions of this
particularly disturbing quote by Steffen, a world-renowned climate
expert, in national UK newspapers. We found the grand total of one
in a short article in the Daily Express. What could better sum up
the pathology of the ‘mainstream’ news media than ignoring urgent
authoritative warnings of the likely collapse of the climate
system?</p>
<p>Scientists have been sounding the alarm for some time that we are
in the midst of a sixth mass extinction in Earth’s long biological
history. But this time the cause is not a natural calamity, such
as a huge volcanism event or an asteroid strike, but human
‘civilisation’. Worse still, the careful evidence accrued by
biologists in study after study indicates that the global mass
loss of species is <em>accelerating</em>. In 2017, a study
published in the journal <em>Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences</em>, reported that billions of populations of
animals have disappeared from the Earth amidst what they called a
‘biological annihilation.’ They said the findings were worse than
previously thought.</p>
<p>Earlier this month, a new study revealed that five hundred
species of land animals are likely to become extinct over the next
two decades. Gerardo Ceballos, an ecologist at the National
Autonomous University of Mexico and lead author of the paper,
declared:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘We’re eroding the capabilities of the planet to maintain human
life and life in general.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>While humans continue to destroy species and natural habitats,
Ceballos and his colleagues warn of a ‘cascading series of
impacts’, including more frequent occurrences of new diseases and
pandemics, such as Covid-19. He summarised:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘All of us need to understand that what we do in the next five
to 10 years will define the future of humanity.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But the crucial window for action is likely much shorter than
that. And it is not just the ‘usual suspects’ of Greens and
wild-eyed radicals who claim so. According to Fatih Birol,
executive director of the International Energy Agency, the world
has just <em>six months</em> to avert climate crisis. This is the
timescale required to ‘prevent a post-lockdown rebound in
greenhouse gas emissions that would overwhelm efforts to stave off
climate catastrophe’.</p>
<p>Samuel Alexander, a lecturer with the University of Melbourne and
research fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute,
told <em>Voice of Action</em> that the looming end of organised
human society would not be a single event. Instead, we are
approaching a stage:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘where we face decades of ongoing crises, as the existing mode
of civilisation deteriorates, but then recovers as governments
and civil society tries to respond, and fix things, and keep
things going for a bit longer.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He added:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘Capitalism is quite good at dodging bullets and escaping
temporary challenges to its legitimacy and viability. But its
condition, I feel, is terminal.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Meanwhile, Steffen believes that current mass protests, such as
Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion, are not yet a sign of
collapse but one of ‘growing instability’. Alexander concurs,
saying that it is a sign of ‘steam building up within a closed
system’. Without large-scale grassroots action and radical shifts
in government policies, we are ‘likely to see explosions of civil
unrest increasingly as things continue to deteriorate’. However,
he offered hope that, with sufficient public pressure, the future
could still be ‘post-growth / post capitalist / post-industrial in
some form.’</p>
<p>Graham Turner, a former senior Australian government research
scientist, observed:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘I think if we all manage to live a simpler and arguably more
fulfilling life then it would be possible still with some
technological advances to have a sustainable future, but it
would seem that it’s more likely … that we are headed towards or
perhaps on the cusp of a sort of global collapse.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He fears that the public as a whole will only demand change once
‘they’re actually losing their jobs or losing their life or seeing
their children directly suffer’.</p>
<p>One positive practical step that people could take, he says, is
to push for changes in the law governing corporations:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘so that corporations don’t have more legal rights than people,
and are not compelled to make a profit for shareholders.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Meanwhile, Siberia, of all places, is undergoing a prolonged
heatwave, described by one climate scientist as ‘undoubtedly
alarming’, which is driving 2020 towards being the globally
hottest year on record.</p>
<span id="more-4945"></span>
<p><strong>Media ‘Failure’ Is Default Media Performance</strong></p>
<p>Many new and dramatic climate findings are, of course, reported
in the science and environment sections of newspapers. <em>But
the compelling case for a radical shift in society towards
sustainability are barely touched upon in corporate news media</em>,
for obvious reasons.</p>
<p>In particular, the imminent threat of climate collapse rarely
intrudes into the numerous pages devoted to ‘politics’, business
and the economy. These pages feature a whole slew of
correspondents, columnists and commentators who are rewarded for <em>not</em>
questioning the status quo.</p>
<p>Worse, no leading political editor – the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg
and ITV’s Robert Peston spring to mind – ever seriously challenges
the Prime Minister, or other senior politicians, on the huge risk
of climate breakdown. The Westminster ‘village’ – surely as
insular a social bubble as has ever existed in this country – is
almost entirely divorced from the reality of onrushing climate
chaos. </p>
<p>As independent journalist Rebecca Fisher, formerly of Corporate
Watch, noted recently:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘UK’s current form of “democracy” cannot protect the public.
The “Westminster model” was developed to promote unregulated
economic growth and prevent the public from real participation
in how society is run.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And yet, unlike the power-hungry Westminster navel-gazers, the
public <em>does</em> believe climate is an urgent issue. A new
survey of 80,000 people conducted across forty countries reveals
that fewer than three per cent believe climate change is not
serious at all.</p>
<p>But, as we and others have long argued, a fundamental obstacle to
shifting to a saner, more democratic society is the narrow
concentration of media ownership; a structural impediment in
today’s world to truly free and open debate. This extreme state of
affairs has been tracked in the UK by the independent Media Reform
Coalition which represents several groups and individuals
committed to promoting journalism and communications that work for
the benefit of the public. The MRC is currently chaired by Natalie
Fenton, professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths,
University of London.</p>
<p>The coalition’s most recent report on UK media ownership,
published in 2019, revealed that the problem is now even worse
than at the time of its previous report in 2015. Just three
companies – Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, Daily Mail Group and Reach
(publisher of the <em>Mirror</em> titles) dominate 83 per cent of
the national newspaper market (up from 71 per cent in 2015). When
online readers are included, just five companies – News UK, Daily
Mail Group, Reach, Guardian and Telegraph – dominate nearly 80 per
cent of the market.</p>
<p>The report’s authors warned:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘We believe that concentration in news and information markets
in particular has reached endemic levels in the UK and that we
urgently need effective remedies. Concentrated ownership creates
conditions in which wealthy individuals and organisations can
amass vast political and economic power and distort the media
landscape to suit their interests.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The warning is further backed up in a forthcoming book, ‘The
Media Manifesto’ (Polity Books, August 2020), by Fenton and
co-authors Des Freedman, Justin Schlosberg and Lina Dencik. They
emphasise a crucial point that is a longstanding characteristic of
rational media analysis: we must stop using the misleading
framework of media ‘failures’. As Noam Chomsky observed many years
ago in describing media performance:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts
with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist.’
(‘Deterring Democracy’, Hill & Wang, 1992, p. 79)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is therefore not a ‘failure’ when newspapers and broadcasters
neglect to scrutinise state-corporate power. Granting a free pass
to power is virtually their <em>raison d’être</em>. Or, as ‘The
Media Manifesto’ observes:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘[The] inability to hold power to account shouldn’t be seen as
an unprecedented “failure” of the media to perform its
democratic role when, in fact, this has long been the media’s
normal role under capitalism: to naturalize and legitimize
existing and unequal social relations.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The authors continue with examples:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘It’s not about failing to hold banks to account but about the
complicity of financial journalists and commentators in
celebrating neoliberal economics ahead of the 2008 financial
crash; it’s not about failing to be tough on racism but about
the media’s historic perpetuation of racist stereotypes and
promotion of anti-immigrant frames; it’s not about failing to
recognize the challenges of apocalyptic climate change but about
repeating tropes about “natural” disasters such as hurricanes,
heatwaves and forest fires, together with routine “balanced”
debates between climate change scientists and deniers. These are
not examples of the media’s malfunctioning but of its default
behaviour.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But, goes up the cry from the back row, what about ‘our’ blessed
BBC? It is, after all, obliged by its Royal Charter to report
objectively and impartially, untrammelled by billionaire ownership
or tawdry commercialisation. Right? Not so.</p>
<p>As Des Freedman observes of the BBC:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘[It] is a compromised version of a potentially noble ideal:
far too implicated in and attached to existing elite networks of
power to be able to offer an effective challenge to them’. (‘The
Media Manifesto’, <em>op. cit.</em>, p. 88)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As can be seen every day of the week, the BBC typically follows a
similar agenda to UK newspapers in its own news coverage. Freedman
adds:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘Far from retaining its autonomy from all vested interests, and
delivering a critical and robust public interest journalism, the
BBC has been a key institutional mechanism for reinforcing
establishment “common sense” and has represented the strategic
interests of the powerful more than the disparate views of
ordinary audiences.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He continues:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘It has reached the point where even the accomplished former
World Service journalist, Owen Bennett-Jones, has condemned the
BBC’s dependence on official sources and argues that “there is
plenty of evidence that the BBC, in both its international and
domestic manifestations, deserves the epithet ‘state
broadcaster’.” Without significant reform, public service media
are, in reality, just as likely to be embroiled in the
reproduction of media power as their commercial counterparts and
therefore just as likely to be part of the problem rather than
the solution.’ (pp. 23-24)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Fenton emphasises the point later in the book:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘despite its claims to be impartial and independent, the BBC
has always sided with the elite and been in thrall to those in
power.’ (p. 88)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Regular readers will be aware that, since we began publishing
media alerts in 2001, we have examined in depth hundreds of
examples of the BBC doing exactly this. If you include those
examples that we highlight almost daily on Twitter and Facebook,
they undoubtedly number in the thousands. Many of the most
insidious examples of such bias, omission and distortion in BBC
News have been expanded upon in several of our books. There is no
shortage of evidence that BBC News functions as a propaganda
outlet for state and corporate interests.</p>
<p>A fundamental obstacle to radical societal change to avert
climate breakdown, therefore, is that ‘mainstream’ media,
including BBC News, exist primarily to uphold the interests of
capital and, in addition, particularly in the case of the BBC, the
state:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘Modern capitalism resides on the complex relationship between
the neoliberal market and the neoliberal state. To address
meaningfully the consequences of climate change, massively
reduce inequality and eradicate poverty, would destabilize the
power relations that underpin finance-led growth. For example,
if the mainstream [sic] press industries do not attempt to
maximise their profits in any way they can today, they will
probably not exist tomorrow.’ (pp. 84-85)</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Concluding Remarks</strong></p>
<p>In a sane world, if senior scientists who normally use
understated academic language start warning of an ‘existential
threat’ to human civilisation, then responsible news media would
leap into action with huge headlines and in-depth coverage. There
would be extensive interviews with scientists on BBC News at Ten,
ITV News, Channel 4 News, Newsnight, Good Morning Britain, BBC
Radio 4 Today, and other major programmes. They would all follow
up with urgent analysis of what needs to be done immediately in
the realms of politics and economics to avert the climate threat,
or at least minimise the serious consequences of that threat.
Instead, state-corporate media have, in effect, exiled scientists
to a distant planet in a remote part of the Galaxy where they can
be ignored.</p>
<p>Billionaire-owned media, controlled by corporate boards and
dependent on corporate ad revenue, and a state broadcaster forever
hobbled by bowing to corporate-beholden governments, can never
provide the answers to climate breakdown. As ‘The Media
Manifesto’ argues, with detailed recommendations, we need properly
accountable, public-interest news media that are truly democratic,
diverse and sustainable.</p>
<p>All the citizen movements that we see today, including Black
Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion, will not succeed unless
common aims are sought across diverse campaigns with a united
goal; namely, <em>dismantling</em> the state-corporate media that
are the propaganda wing for destructive state-corporate power, and
<em>replacing</em> such media with news organisations that serve
the public interest.</p>
<p>We must be clear that the powerful need to be challenged
directly; non-violently, yes, but with strength, persistence and
wisdom on the basis of clear strategic aims. Meekly asking for
change and accepting weak compromises will not work given the
gravity of the climate crisis. Media academic Robert McChesney put
it well:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘Many liberals who wish to reform and humanize capitalism are
uncomfortable with seemingly radical movements, and often work
to distance themselves from them, lest respectable people in
power cast a withering eye at them. “Shhh,” they say to people
like me. “If we antagonize or scare those in power we will lose
our seat at the table and not be able to win any reforms.” Yet
these same liberal reformers often are dismayed at how they are
politically ineffectual. Therein lies a great irony, because to
enact significant reforms requires a mass movement (or the
credible prospect of a mass movement) that does indeed threaten
the powerful.’ (Robert McChesney, ‘Blowing the Roof Off the
Twenty-First Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for
Post-Capitalist Democracy’, Monthly Review Press, 2014, pp.
26-27)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In short, the powerful need to have their power – originally
stolen from us anyway – taken away from them in order to ensure
human survival.</p>
<p>DC</p>
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