Great post by Matt Yglesias.Something those of us who want to prevent catastrophic climate change need to remember is that we’re right. Not just factually right, but morally. But while it’s true that effective communications tactics employed by the other side have been helpful to their cause, ultimately the main thing that’s helped them has been the willingness of people who know better to act in a morally indefensible manner.Yglesias also takes a swipe at CNN for its wildly irresponsible - if not downright evil - framing of a story on climate change as “Global Warming: Fact or Fiction.” As CNN well knows, or at least should well know, the only "fiction" here is being spewed by global warming "skeptics" and "deniers." Once again, though, the corporate media hackopolis is more interested in "infotainment," and also in framing every issue - no matter if 99.99999% of evidence is on one side - as "there are two equal sides, here they are." I would say this is mindless, but it's actually far worse, because it does serious damage by misinforming people on a daily basis. Honestly, at this point, I've pretty much concluded that if the entire corporate media - including the news media - disappeared tomorrow, we'd actually be better off than we are now. That's how pathetically bad it is.
I’m fairly certain, for example, that Fred Hiatt wouldn’t strangle a baby polar bear just for cheap thrills. But he would run an ignorant Sarah Palin op-ed on climate, and repeatedly allow George Will to mislead people about climate science. What’s more, if Hiatt strolled around Washington soaked in the blood of polar bears he’d been strangling, people would treat him like a pariah. But instead his friends and colleagues and professional peers have evidently decided that he’s just a nice guy who happens to run a crappy-but-influential op-ed page...
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...if you think of any major problem this country has ever solved—the Civil War, women’s suffrage, defeating Nazism, Civil Rights—it’s always required not just smart tactics, but moral behavior, people willing to cast risky votes, people willing to risk physical harm in combat or non-violent resistance. It’s been the same all around the world throughout history. If people don’t want to do the right thing, the right thing doesn’t get done. On climate, in particular, a huge swathe of the American elite has simply refused to acknowledge any sort of duty or obligation.
By the way, for yet another example of how bad the Washington Post - and the corporate media more broadly - sucks C02, see today's lies by Charles Krauthammer equating the EPA to "Big Brother," among other insanity (note: this is the same guy who about a year ago was calling for a $1 per gallon gas tax increase in order to get us off of oil and defund OPEC, and also bring "the collateral environmental effect of reducing pollution and CO2 emissions, an important benefit for those who believe in man-made global warming and a painless bonus for agnostics (like me) who nonetheless believe that the endless pumping of CO2 into the atmosphere cannot be a good thing." What changed, Charles?
