Are they public? I want to buy stock.
As climate and the environment goes to smash and the “mainstream” media refuses to pay attention, I predict that Inside Climate News–insideclimatnews.com–will become, shall we say, hotter and hotter.
Katherine Bagley wrote about the Times enviro desk closing.
This follows on the disturbing news last month that the Times was eliminating 30 news room positions, offering buyouts but then distributing pink slips if the buyout offers didn’t bring enough takers.
Does the Times not understand that its trump card, its market advantage lies above all in the depth of its news coverage and news desk?
And it’s doing it: shutting down its environment desk.
I’m afraid this is part of the widening disconnect between what the “mainstream” commercial media tells us is important and the dissenting verdict of reality itself.
It’s getting worse and worse: it often seems as though much, if not most of the profession is living in a parallel universe.
Read about it at commondreams.org.
The Center for American Progress crunches the numbers.
“It’s getting worse and worse every year!” a woman in her 80s said to me about our climate. She certainly has seen enough to notice what’s happened on the macro scale.
Why our leaders refuse to act remains a mystery to me, however.
Tina Gerhardt in The Progressive describes the coalition of “over 70 environmental, civil, health and labor groups” who’ve now written the President demanding that he take action on climate change.
When we in the Dance Critics Association presented Sunil Kothari with our senior critic award in 2010, it was refreshing to hear him get down to brass tacks.
Kothari worked for the Times of India for 40 years. In the talk he gave at our annual conference, as well as in an interview published in the DCA newsletter, he declared unequivocally that dance coverage had vanished from newspapers in India because the “press lords” were not going to “allow” it to continue to be covered.
And that is something that needs to be recalled as we survey the cultural vacuum of our own “mainstream” commercial media here in the US. The decision to eviscerate cultural content—if it is even explained at all – is justified as bowing to some kind of inevitability, some kind of ukase laid down by a readership. It’s not. It’s based on a journalistic paradigm now dominated by clueless bean counters, editors who couldn’t care or know less about it, and culture-free moguls. And then they wonder why readership and ad content plummet.
Of course it is a vicious circle—the less presence culture has, the less awareness of it. Eventually people stop knowing what they’re missing, and the cultural institutions—we’re seeing that in dance—stop answering to any kind of accountability. And the more marginal something like dance becomes, the more the high-visibility media feels justified in ignoring it.
It’s a sad, sick situation, and absolutely unimaginable when I started writing about dance 30 years ago.
In light of the Mayor’s appalling comparison of the teacher’s union to the NRA, part of his long-standing attempt to undermine public education in NYC via privatization, I’ll be posting some choice facts sent from my Assemblywoman Deborah Glick.
Now where is that brochure. . .?
Fair.org:
“As usual when Democrats win elections (Extra!, 1–2/93, 1/07, 3/12), plenty of corporate media pundits advised them to act as though they lost.”
Naked Capitalism thinks so. It deconstructs preposterous claims made by Annie Lowrey in the New York Times about the progressivity [?!!!] of our tax code.
“What is disconcerting now,” NC writes, ” is the frequency with which articles that are thinly veiled media plants are run uncritically. . . ”
The NYT article in question appears in the business section, and of course business sections nationally are especially guilty of dishonest and distorted economic analysis.
When, indeed, are we going to get back to having some labor reporters as well, to balance the supply-side tilt?
Must-read piece by Eric Zuessler at buzzflash.com.
