Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

S
62 politics and governance
Ecosystem Assessment Report, the largest study ever done on the
health of the planet, appeared in the spring of 2005, for example,
none of the major news channels reported the story, and it did not
make the front page of our national newspapers like the New York
Times. Instead, the highly politicized story of a brain-dead woman
(Terri Schiavo) was the lead story on the evening news and dominated
most newspaper front pages as well as radio and television
talk shows. The fact that the natural systems on which we depend
were dying did not matter to the people who defi ne the “news,”
but short-term market share did matter, and that called for sensationalism
and the further cultivation of public cupidity.
There is no single solution to what is a complex problem, but
obvious reforms would go a long way toward restoring the free
fl ow of information. The fi rst would require returning to the idea
written into the Communications Act of 1934, which granted
broadcasters use of public airwaves on the condition that they
would serve the public interest (Hill, 2006, p. 121). But in recent
years, public programming and political coverage on the major
networks have plummeted along with the quantity, quality, and
integrity of news reporting. The problem is simply that “the press
has grown too close to the sources of power in this nation, making
it largely the communication mechanism of the government,
not the people” (Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston, 2007, p.1).
A second change would be to again enforce the 1947 rule by the
Federal Communications Commission that required fair and balanced
coverage of the news in order to hold and retain a license
to use the public airwaves. Since 1987 that rule has been largely
ignored by the appointees to a highly politicized FCC (Thomas,
2006, pp. 124–134). As a consequence, according to a report from
the Center for American Progress, over 90 percent of talk radio
across the United States, for example, is “conservative,” much of it
unencumbered by fact and seldom challenged in open debate. The
public airwaves, in effect, have been co-opted not to inform the
citizenry but to wage a “culture war” and to demonize opponents.