If any humans survive to write the history of our times, our self-destructive reliance on the broadcast media ought to come in for a fair share of the blame. “If it bleeds, it leads,” is a fair description of the problem. TV’s audience cares more about sensational pictures than sobering facts, or at least TV producers behave as if it was so.
Consider the news of the last weekend. An immensely important report providing a detailed scientific analysis of the accelerating pace of climate change and its consequences was released by the Trump administration. It is the Fourth National Climate Assessment, mandated by Congress in 1990 to appear periodically. The first was published in 2000, the second in 2009, the third in 2104 and the two volumes of the fourth in 2017 and this week.
The denier Trump administration timed its release or coincide wth Black Friday’s rush to purchase merch and the rest of the holiday weekend’s festivities, NFL games, and the associated travel home by millions. Add to that the aftermath of wildfires, blizzards, refugees camping on our southern border, and presidential tweets manufacturing imaginary threats, and guess what?
The actual threats we face got lost on the shuffle. To be fair, Trump is no less in thrall to television than the millions of viewers he seeks to bamboozle. For instance, when he saw a report showing that his bankrupting tax cuts will swell the deficit to $1 trillion for 2019, he threw a hissy fit and demanded his cabinet cut the budget by 15%. But he also listed several new programs he wanted them to fund, and demanded that they not cut Social Security, Medicare or the military. Since they account for 79% of the budget, the deficit will continue to rise.
Most people will not be aware of this dire threat or worse ones if they watch TV news or listen to Trump. For years, the news media have collaborated in Trump’s sleight of hand, directing our eyes to one shiny object after another as, behind the curtain, the real story is ignored: Democratic institutions undermined, the executive branch usurping the power of Congress and the courts, popular programs sabotaged, laws violated, and fake news substituted for reality.
The good news is the American people have access to the information they need concerning the real threats they face. The bad news is the vast majority of them, like Trump himself, are only half literate. That is, can read, but won’t. But if they did, they could start with the report he wants you to ignore: nca2018.globalchange.gov.
It details the best assessment currently available of the way climate change will impact our lives, our country, and our children’s future. The effects on weather, the economy, geopolitics, ocean levels, temperature, seasonal variation, health, disease, population migration, agriculture. You can search it by region of the country in which you live or subject of interest. It offers a range of possible outcomes from least bad to the apocalyptic worst.
Public Television has also continued to cover the subject, possibly because Trump does not know it exists. Public TV, that is, though budget cuts have been aimed at the institution by Republicans for years because they view it as subversive, like most scientific, artistic and educational endeavors. “Sinking Cities” provided an engineer’s eye view of what it will take to keep Tokyo, New York, Miami and London above water in the years ahead. A great deal of ingenuity and billions of dollars. “Frontline,” “Nova” and other shows occasionally address aspects of the subject.
“The New Yorker” has provided a wealth of reporting on climate dangers, most recently in the Nov. 26 edition where Bill McKibbben offered a sobering look at “How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet.” Among other alarming facts, it describes in some detail how the oil companies, led by Exxon, fought against the notion of climate change and worked to elect deniers to office.
Yet internally, the company as early as the 1980s was perfectly aware that climate change is real and had its scientists do their own elaborate assessments of the impacts on their business, including on ocean drilling, arctic melting and the like. McKibben also quotes a recent study that anticipates changes in growing seasons, crop belts, and the aquifer will reduce harvests of corn and soybeans by as much as fifty percent in the next several decades, ushering in a new era of dust bowls.
From a TV perspective, such changes are unphotogenic, both figuratively and literally glacial, but the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was also slow-moving, yet no less newsworthy. Dying with a whimper, not a bang, won’t make us any less dead. And speaking of extinction, “The New Yorker” also published reporting by Elizabeth Kolbert now gathered in “The Sixth Extinction.”
In the past, there have been five great waves of extinction in which uncounted species perished. The one currently taking place, while we watch bickering housewives, American Idols and tweeting presidents on TV, is the first that is both manmade and likely to include among its victims, along with insects, fish, and the other mammals, man himself. Before it’s too late, read all about it. And vote out of office climate deniers. The species you save could be your own.