Sharks and Climate Porn
Do you remember a few years ago the media went wild about shark attacks? The whole summer, there was one story after another about people being attacked by sharks, how to avoid being attacked by a shark, where sharks are most common and on and on and on. You couldn't turn on cable news without hearing about sharks. Turned out there were actually FEWER shark attacks that summer than in previous years, but for whatever reason, sharks were the sexy story that summer and that's just the way it was.
That's one of my biggest fears with the news media today. The competition for your interest has gotten so intense that reporting facts, or just an evenhanded story, won't fly anymore. It has to be sexy. Maybe that's why the left-leaning British Institute for Public Policy Research issued a report in August, 2006 accusing media outlets of engaging in "climate porn" to attract the public's attention. And how else would you describe Vanity Fair's photo illustration of Manhattan drowned by an 80-foot sea-level rise, when scientific consensus would say that in the next hundred years, the sea level will rise somewhere between 3 and 34 inches? That's just one of many examples of the extreme positions the media puts out there to get your attention. Would you pick up a magazine that showed sea level at Manhattan increased by 3 inches? Could you tell?
A recent editorial by Mike Hulmne, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, addressed this same issue, but expanded it from just media coverage to include language used by politicians, environmental activists and even scientists. Has there ever been a time when rational discourse has been more necessary, and yet harder to find?
Comments (2)
This has always been my concern. Glitz sells, be it positive or negative. Combine that with the seemingly inexhaustible funding available for any and all pseudo-science projects, and you have the funding for the glitz. Anyone can find multiple scientific studies to support just about any hypothesis, no matter how inconsistent with other so-called scientific studies. Twenty-four-hour media coverage has the communications industry scrambling for content, and the media seem to have no trouble filling the need with mindless repetition of meaningless dribble. In order to keep the audience engaged with the repetition, they need to add artificial spice to the endless flow of garbage, and that's how we get the exaggerations, the hype, the warnings of catastrophe and the anxiety of doom and destruction. We have too much time to absorb too much media which is consumed with too much money and too many special interest agendas. God help us all!
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