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Failure of Corporate Media to Report on Climate Activism is Shocking Indictment [1]
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Date: 2023-05-03
Samuel Corum, Getty Images - A Pic You Likely Did Not See on the News
The White House Correspondents Dinner – that remarkable annual coming together of the rich and powerful with the honest, usually impoverished yeoman scribes who hold them accountable and speak truth to power…
Oh, who am I kidding?
The White House Correspondents Dinner is a festival of back-slapping, air-smooching, networking, and social posing, interspersed with a snappy speech from the president and a funny turn by an “irreverent” host. It’s a place for the national media to show their true colors as insider’s insiders, in the same class, and with the same social and financial aspirations, as the DC powerful they’re supposed to be scrutinizing.
It’s a social media spectacle, peppered with starlets, Hollywood hunks, and “influencers,” whatever they are. It dominates Twitter and Tik Tok for days, generating click-baity headlines and spawning juicy industry gossip.
Some years it even results in a petty New York mob boss getting his delicate fee-fees hurt, running for president, and, 4 short years later, inciting a violent mob to storm the Capitol in an attempt to subvert the peaceful transfer of power!
But I digress. It is what it is. And one thing that it is is… splashy. Buzzy! Newsworthy!
One notable sidebar to this year’s event was a large protest by climate activists, who likely thought that the confluence of national media, dazzling movie stars, singers, models, and various other celebrities (not to mention the actual President of the United States ) would focus eyeballs on their action.
It did not. In fact, the protest was barely mentioned by outlets like MSNBC and CNN, despite them having actual reporters in the building. Per Common Dreams:
Members of the corporate media were greeted by hundreds of climate action organizers Saturday night as they arrived at the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. for the annual White House Correspondents Dinner.
Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club, reported:
The majority of activists formed a blockade in front of the driveway to the hotel’s main entrance. President Biden and many other attendees ended up entering through an unattended entrance. Guests that entered through the front of the hotel slowly felt their way around the blockade until they eventually reached a narrow opening guarded by DC Police. Some guests expressed frustration about the inconvenience, especially as protesters momentarily sealed a side pathway that provided relatively easy entry that avoided having to wade through the crowd.
Common Dreams again (are you picking up on my lack of Big Corporate Media stories to quote?):
The protest came weeks after the Biden administration approved Willow, the massive oil drilling project on federal lands in Alaska, and a month after an oil and gas lease sale of 1.6 million acres of offshore waters in the Gulf of Mexico went forward. "We disrupted the rich and powerful because Joe Biden's approval of deadly new oil and gas projects is killing the planet," said Climate Defiance after the blockade. "We will continue to disrupt until we end fossil fuels."
The lack of solid, context-intensive coverage of such a large and important climate action was… is “disappointing” the word I’m looking for? It is not.
The words I am looking for are “tragic,” “stupid,” “ridiculous,” “craven,” and “shameful.” The lack of serious coverage is a shocking indictment of our blinkered, attention whoring, profit-driven corporate media.
I get it. Snazzy outfits and snappy jokes get clicks. Everybody likes attention and money.
Still, it’s hard not to think the media might have their priorities just a little bit askew when we consider that UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the latest IPCC report (the front page of which says in 62 point type that climate change is “a threat to human wellbeing and health of the planet”) “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.”
That sounds bad to me, and like something that should be reported more vociferously. It sounds, in fact, like a topic that requires a screaming banner headline each and every day.
When activists show up to blockade the president and his coterie of rich and powerful friends at a splashy media-saturated event, there should not be near radio silence. In all fairness, there were a few short teasers here and there in the run-up to the dinner. But as the action unfolded, and the following day? Crickets .
And honestly – what’s up with that?
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/3/2167294/-Failure-of-Corporate-Media-to-Report-on-Climate-Activism-is-Shocking-Indictment
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