Thursday, April 25, 2013

You CANNOT be serious: Yale Forum on Climate Change and Media article bemoans the fact that mainstream media coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings crowded out climate change hoax news last week

A Partial Eclipse of Earth News — by Boston Marathon Bombings | The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media
On Monday, April 15, the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) launched a new report, “The Policy Climate,” at the Brookings Institution.
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From mid-afternoon Monday, April 15 — an hour before the start of the CPI event at Brookings — until late Friday night, the Boston Marathon bombings and aftermath dominated the news, with the fatal fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, providing a vivid mid-week interlude.

Unquestionably, the traumatic and “breaking” events in Boston were newsworthy. And Americans have come to expect the 24/7 cable coverage many collectively turn to in times of such crises. From more traditional “mainstream” news sources, however, many expect a heightened sense of perspective. And without that boader perspective, the public’s understanding of life’s risks can be distorted...
In the days after the Boston bombings, NPR did, in fact, run three stories on climate change. Two were part of an extended report on ocean acidification prepared by an NPR reporter who had traveled to Australia to get that story. The third was on the emerging genre of “cli-fi,” or climate fiction. But what, social psychology reporter Shankar Vendantam might wonder, was the net effect on NPR listeners of these nineteen minutes about climate change given the hours devoted to imagining the methods and motives of the two young alleged Boston bombers?

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