omments are flatly false and absurd, the fact is that articles of this kind<@151>however benign and humorous their intention<@151>serve the corporations well by making the threat of global warming seem a joke, the preserve of paranoid depressives.
To his credit, Roy Greenslade of The Observer (July 21, 1996) did manage to comment on the failure of the press to cover the global warming story. Referring to British Environment Secretary John Gummer’s declaration at the United Nations conference in Geneva that "Global climate change needs global action now. The alarm bells ought to be ringing in every capital of the world," Greenslade writes "I thought… this is sure to be big news in the morning. I imagined the front-page stories, the feature articles and the leaders." It was not to be; although Greenslade urges that we award credit where credit’s due: namely, "The Daily Telegraph alone placed the story on page one."
Elsewhere, the story was met with indifference and hostility: "Every right-wing paper has attempted to debunk global warming," Greenslade reports. As for the reason for the media’s failure to cover either the IPCC report or Gummer’s speech: "There were probably two opposing reasons…Those papers which greeted the conference by accepting its central thesis assumed they had done enough. Papers which cannot stomach the scientific evidence for global warming ignored it. This latter attitude leaves readers seriously uninformed about a serious issue."
Why some papers cannot "stomach the scientific evidence for global warming" is left to the readers’ imagination. Such an analysis<@151>at the very extreme of mainstream media coverage<@151>should be sufficient to reduce any sane person to tears. Before the world drowns in melt water, it seems sure that we will already have long since drowned in banality and half-truths. <N><BUS>Z <N>
@COMINGNEXT = David Edwards is the author of <W0>Burning All Illusions (South End Press).