I’ve been left most troubled by the comparably constrained reporting on man-made global warming and the large part played by fossil fuel extraction, refinement and consumption, including that of Canadian fractured gas and crude oil. Contrarily, Facebook offers much more freedom of information.
In an interview with the online National Observer, renowned linguist and cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky stated in regards to “[even] the liberal media” that, though there are stories published about manmade climate change, “it’s as if … there’s a kind of a tunnel vision — the science reporters are occasionally saying ‘look, this is a catastrophe,’ but then the regular [non-environmental] coverage simply disregards it.”
Then there was the unsigned editorial in (local community newspaper) The Peace Arch News printed just before Earth Day 2017, titled “Earth Day in need of a facelift”. (Varied lengths of the same editorial were also printed in sister-papers The Langley Times, Chilliwack Progress and Surrey Now-Leader, although other B.C. community newspapers ran it as well.)
It opined that “some people would argue that [the day of environmental action] … is an anachronism”, that it should instead be a day of recognizing what we’ve societally accomplished. “And while it [has] served us well, in 2017, do we really need Earth Day anymore?”
This notion was to me so absurd that I mused as to whether it was penned by Tom Fletcher, who fully supports increased Canadian fossil fuel harvesting and criticizes man-made climate change science.
In all my years, I’ve never once heard anyone, in or outside of the news-media, suggest that we’re doing so well as to render Earth Day “an anachronism”. Still, considering the sorry state of the planet’s natural environment, it was the most irresponsible form of editorial journalism I’ve yet seen in my three decades of newspaper consumption. For, although some readers may dismiss it as just another opinion, there are many readers (as I once was) who’ll take such unsigned editorials as a seriously considered and balanced argument.
Indeed, it was the day I became the most jaded towards the profession and became more familiar with the completely open forum Facebook platforms.
What’s truly unfortunate, however, is that such social media open forum availability on this most pressing topic may have still been at least a decade too late.