Neil deMause: The Website

In an analysis of media coverage of the cap-and-trade climate legislation, I compare it to reporting on the health care bill, noting that in both cases journalists omitted any mention of criticism that the bills were too weak. And perfect timing too, since the climate bill just got even more like the health bill, in that Obama is backing away from trying to pass it anytime soon.

The sweeping bill to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions that moved through Congress over the last year received relatively scant media attention, taking a distant back seat to the healthcare reform bill and its attendant public uproar. And, much like the healthcare debate (Extra!, 10/09), coverage of climate-change legislation ended up obscuring the issues as much as it explained them, viewing a Democratic compromise bill through the lens of right-wing and corporate criticism, while marginalizing progressive critics who said the legislation was insufficient to the task at hand…. [read more]

As if I weren’t worried enough about the fate of the world, I picked up the Times today and read this in what was meant to be an optimistic report on how global carbon emissions have fallen as a result of the economic collapse:

The forecast should also make it easier for most nations to meet emissions reduction targets in the near and medium term and could give a lift toward a new global warming treaty, said Paul W. Bledsoe of the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan advisory group.

“Because many countries are using 2005 as a baseline year, this will give them some breathing room when economic activity picks up again,” Mr. Bledsoe said.

In other words: Nations may be willing to agree to limits on carbon emissions if they get to compare them to pre-recession levels, since this would allow them to actually emit more greenhouse gases and still call it a “cut.” Woohoo?

Concern about global climate change isn’t actually doing much yet to forestall disaster:

Remember global warming? It seems like only yesterday that we were watching bits of Antarctica flake off into the ocean — not to mention even less-gripping sights, like Al Gore with a laser pointer — and worrying whether humanity’s love of SUVs and air conditioning was going to doom us to extinction by midcentury… [read more]

So the reports by CNN’s Gary Tuchman of serious flooding in the Lower 9th Ward - as well as his later report that the police were telling anyone in the area that the levees there could “explode at any time” - turned out to be inaccurate: Some water did overtop the levees there, but it looks as if the levees held firm. Of course, it took hours before viewers could be assured of this, as CNN’s (and other stations’) reporters otherwise stayed out of New Orleans’ low-lying neighborhoods, relying solely on Army Corps of Engineers assurances that the levees were holding. Which turned out to be true this time, but if it hadn’t been, who would have known?

In all, the Gustav reporting was a notch better than that during Katrina (at least someone bothered to train cameras on some levees), but still exhibited the focus on the tourist district and reliance on official sources that plagued coverage three years ago, at least until one NBC cameraman thought to walk the few blocks to the Convention Center. For example, while disgraced former FEMA chief Mike Brown has been interviewed on nearly every news station about the Gustav response, I’ve yet to see any interviews with New Orleanians who were evacuated on the buses that, this time, the government provided for people with no means of getting out of harm’s way. (Though Anderson Cooper’s blog does have a brief item about one evacuee shelter with no working plumbing.) If nothing else, asking evacuees whether they knew of people who’d been forced to stay behind in New Orleans would have helped answer the question of whether official claims that only 10,000 people remained in the city were true - something no station attempted to verify.

Anyway, looks like there will be two more opportunities coming up for the news media to work on their coverage. We’ll see how they do.

With Anderson Cooper momentarily off the air (he’s moving his satellite truck so it doesn’t blow over), CNN has turned to Gary Tuchman, who’s finally made it to the Lower 9th Ward. There, he reports, a “deluge of water” is pouring in “over and through” the levee, and stop signs are already underwater. Tuchman promised camera footage to come.

So kudos to CNN for getting somebody out into the neighborhoods this time. Though they’d get more kudos if Tuchman hadn’t been standing next to Cooper in the French Quarter an hour ago, talking about how it looked like New Orleans would be spared flooding this time.

Best unintentionally funny moment of the Gustav reporting so far: Anderson Cooper, standing in the official reporting zone of the French Quarter, assuring viewers that “You don’t see anyone on the streets here except police and emergency personnel - anyone still in town is hunkered down.” At that very moment, four twentysomething guys in street clothes wandered through the shot behind him, waving their arms in the hurricane-force winds.

I figure another ten minutes before it ends up on YouTube.

Flipping cable channels for the latest on Hurricane Gustav, I can’t help notice a striking similarity to the run-up to Hurricane Katrina three years ago: Every single news station is reporting from the French Quarter, or the adjacent downtown region. Even Anderson Cooper, the supposed hero journalist of Katrina, remarked a bit ago that while city officials say the city is mostly evacuated, he has no way of knowing if it’s true.

Is it really too much to expect that, now that Katrina alerted the nation that parts of New Orleans exist outside the tourist districts, the media actually go report from there to see how folks are handling this new threat? Probably yes - after all, a mere six months after Katrina, the vast majority of the reporting was on how Mardi Gras had returned to normal, and never mind that the rest of the city was a disaster, and tens of thousands of people were still displaced.

I did just see one CNN correspondent - I didn’t catch his name - mention to Cooper that while the tourist areas of New Orleans are in reasonably good shape today, the outlying neighborhoods are not. Still, I haven’t seen a single piece of video footage, or even blog post, from the poorer sections of town. Let’s hope we don’t have a repeat of 2005, when the nation went to bed on Monday night assured that “the water is going down” in the French Quarter, only to later learn that at moment, the levees had been breached for more than 12 hours, and half the city - the not-ready-for-prime-time half - was already underwater.

When my editor at Metro suggested I write my column this week about Earth Day, my first response was “What about it?” Then I remembered the bagel crisis:

Tomorrow is Earth Day, which means you’re likely to hear a lot of talk about low-energy light bulbs and taking shorter showers, roof gardens and alternative-fuel cars. You’re less likely to hear much about $1 bagels… [read more]

Reports on climate change look very different depending on whether you’re getting your news from British media or U.S. ones. (In the subscribers-only print edition, so you’ll need to order Extra! to read it - or look for it on Nexis if you have an account there.

If 2006 was the year that the issue of global climate change broke through into greater public consciousness–thanks in large part to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, plus books like Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe–2007 could be the year that it becomes old news.

Between February and May of this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a joint project of the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization, issued a series of three comprehensive reports designed to present the scientific evidence for climate change, as well as the likely consequences and how the most catastrophic effects can be avoided. By the end of it, “Live Aid” organizer Bob Geldof could be moved to harrumph on hearing of Al Gore’s planned “Live Earth” concerts to raise consciousness of the issue: “We are all fucking conscious of global warming.”

How conscious you are, though, likely depends largely on where you live–and how you get your news…

I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the odd things about freelance journalism is that you can be drowning in work, and yet the time lag from research to the printed page means there isn’t much to show for it right away. I guess it’s not quite as bad as being a musician - the Mekons have reportedly had a new album all but ready to go for two years now, and that’s not even close to a record - but it’s still frustrating sometimes when it’s time to write these updates. In any event, there should be plenty of fruits to my labor over the next month or two - not to give too much away, but let’s just say you might not want to be nominating Anderson Cooper for a Nobel Peace Prize just yet.

As for last month’s fruits, as promised last month, the Village Voice ran my investigation into the new, even stricter welfare rules and what they’re likely to mean for poor
families in New York. (Hint: It’s not going to be less dysfunctional bureaucracy.) One of the troublesome city programs singled out in my article: WeCARE, an “intensive case management” system that mostly served to force people to truck halfway across the city to meet with an endless stream of doctors and case workers, or else have their benefits cut off - and within days, the city had announced it would switch to decentralized services in clients’ own neighborhoods. Coincidence?

On the sports stadium front, the Yanks and Mets deals are currently on hiatus - possibly for several months - but Minnesota more than picked up the slack, passing a nearly $400 million sales-tax package to fund the bulk of costs for a new Twins stadium. The approval came after more than a decade of legislative debates, and with polls showing Minnesota residents still opposed to the deal by a 2-to-1 margin. Baseball Prospectus subscribers can read my take on why the state legislature caved, while everyone else can see my interview in the Minneapolis City Pages.

Also on my agenda for the month was reading a pair of books I’d been meaning to get to - and which I highly recommend if you or your loved ones intend to live on this planet for more than the next few years. Elizabeth
Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe is a slim, eminently readable travelogue on the devastating, irreversible impacts of global climate change - it’s probably the lightest reading you’ll ever do on the end of the world. (That’s a compliment, by the way, to Kolbert’s New Yorker-honed prose. Incidentally, I worked on a college newspaper with Elizabeth’s brother Dan, and while he didn’t teach me everything I know about journalism, he certainly gave me a good nudge in the right direction. Thanks, Dan!)

For a meatier look at the same topic, check out Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers, which includes such unlikely-but-not-unlikely-enough scenarios
as the complete collapse of the Amazon rainforest ecosystem and the halting of the Gulf Stream, bringing Ice Age conditions to Europe. (Flannery is also the author of one of my other favorite books, The Eternal Frontier, a history of North America over the past 65 million years that contains the only description I’ve seen of how to preserve mastodon meat by burying it in a bog.) Flannery goes on a bit at times - feel free to skip the first chapter about the Gaia theory - but it’s still gripping reading, and at least spares you having to watch Al Gore.

Between the two of them, Kolbert and Flannery make clear that radical change is needed in the way we produce and consume energy, and soon, if we have any hope of preventing catastrophe within our lifetimes. It looks like we can have SUVs or polar bears, but not both. And if we don’t choose soon, possibly not either.

And on that cheery note, I’ll see you next month. Happy hurricane season!