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Can We Trust The Media On The Environment? David Edwards The Ecologist Saturday 01 Jan 2000 Pubdate: , 2000 Source: The Ecologist (U.K.) Author: David Edwards CAN WE TRUST THE MEDIA ON THE ENVIRONMENT? Are We Getting The Facts About The World From A Free Press, Or Being Led Astray By A Corporate Media Uninterested In The Real Issues? The mass media is made up of profit-seeking corpora I ions owned by wealthy individuals and a handful of transnational parent companies. These media corporations are all tied into the stock market and are all highly dependent on advertising revenue. The media's primary products are audiences, preferably wealthy ones, which are sold to advertisers. Naturally enough, advertisers are extremely sensitive to media content. Proctor & Gamble, the world's biggest advertiser, has explicitly prohibited programmes 'which could in any way further the concept of business as cold, ruthless, and lacking all sentiment or spiritual motivation'. No mention was made of programmes accurately depicting the corporate devastation of the environment. The Economist reports that media 'projects unsuitable for corporate sponsorship tend to die on the vine,' adding that 'stations have learned to be sympathetic to the most delicate sympathies of corporations'. In the US, NBC and CBS are owned by arms manufacturers General Electric and Westinghouse, respectively. Oil companies such as Exxon, Texaco, and Mobil have representatives on the boards of these media giants, as has Lockheed Martin, which builds the F-22 fighter. A survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors revealed that a third of editors 'would not feel free to run a news story that was damaging to their parent firm'. In Britain, Donald Trelford came close to being sacked as Observer editor by proprietor Tiny Rowland after lie damaged Rowland's interests by exposing atrocities in Zimbabwe. Rowland openly declared that his company would not support an editor who 'showed no concern for [its] commercial interests'. The situation, then, is one in which profit-seeking media corporations, tied into the stock market status quo, are surrounded by giant profit-seeking trans-national corporations, by which they are owned, on which they are dependent, and by which they are subject to levels of influence capable of humbling national governments. As a result, as Noam Chomsky has written, the basic operating principle of the US and British media, rarely violated, is that 'what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist'. Because the corporate media system is in no way separable from the wider corporate system, the question should properly be reformulated as 'Can the corporate system be trusted to police and reform itself?' The answer, quite obviously, is, 'no'. Political scientist Thomas Ferguson observes that the major media, 'controlled by large profit-maximising investors, do not encourage the dissemination of news and analyses that are likely to lead to popular indignation and, perhaps, government action hostile to the interests of all large investors, themselves included'. No issue is more hostile to the interests of investors, media included, than the corporate destruction of the environment for profit. The Channel 4 series, *Against Nature*, claimed that environmentalism is'based on a fear of change', and has roots in 'xenophobic right wing movements', such as 'the German Nazis'. In response to my complaint about this programme, Michael Jackson, Chief Executive of Channel 4, wrote, 'The small but significant group of people who hold views opposed to the environmental lobby have rarely been seen on British television.' Endless adverts, business dailies, and programmes pushing cars, travel and fashion, do not qualify, apparently. Occasional references to environmental issues feels like balance to media executives like Jackson, because even a little of this self-harming coverage seems a lot. Unfortunately, many environmentalists -- raised on a diet of media exclusion -- have also lost sight of what constitutes appropriate coverage, as the sheer weight of scientific evidence and public concern have forced the environment onto the agenda to a limited extent. Global warming, for example, is reported, but the level of coverage - even now, with thousands dying in giant storms 'clearly tainted by human actions', according to scientists - is dwarfed by the seriousness of the threat. Likewise, the pitiful response that is the Kyoto Protocol - proposing a 5.2 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions as against the 60 per cent required to stabilise the climate - and the true depth of business opposition to even these cuts, are accorded a tiny fraction of the coverage they merit. Compare the mass hysteria generated by the media in response to the merely hypothetical (and in fact largely invented) 'threat' of Soviet invasion during the Cold War, with floods of Hollywood films, front-page stories and documentaries. What is the difference? The 'red menace', granted official approval by business-dominated Western governments, powerfully boosted corporate interests, generating massive arms budgets for high-tech industry. It also provided a pretext for military interventions securing Third World resources for Western corporations against the real threat of independent nationalism in countries like Guatemala, Nicaragua, Vietnam and Indonesia. Global warming, downplayed by the same governments, does not promote but threatens giant oil, automobile and construction interests; facts similarly reflected in the media where, as journalist Ross Gelbspan has noted, news on global warming evokes an 'eerie silence.' David Edwards
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