Dominique Browning barely touches on the pivotal role of the corporatized news system in her attribution of causes for the decline in robust discussion of climate change in the United States. The deregulation begun under Ronald Reagan has put our media increasingly under corporate control, and the national interest has suffered dramatically thereby. Nowhere is this more telling than in the media’s handling of climate change, where false equivalency — the “balancing” of each scientifically informed voice with a petroleum-funded one — has helped convince the public that the debate is “still open.”
With each new study (even ones funded by conservative climate deniers) confirming the planetary scientific consensus, any debate we should be having about climate change is no longer whether it’s real and dangerous but what to do about this increasingly immediate threat. And any action on climate that ignores media reform condemns itself to ineffectuality.
Warren Senders, MEDFORD, MASS.