The Mainstream Media's Centrism and the Reality of Climate Change

In our time the mainstream media's failures of reportage, as judged by any reasonably objective standard, have been legion, with one of the most notorious of those failures its coverage of climate change--because it has been a matter of the media treating a matter of material reality verifiable and verified through an overwhelming amount of physical science research activity as "debatable."

One can, of course, see this as a matter of the profound ignorance of the media's personnel about scientific matters, and the very real efforts of certain business interests to muddle understanding of the issue, undermining the awareness of what they themselves recognized as fact behind poses of what is euphemistically called "skepticism."

However, one can also see it as a matter of the extent to which the media is deferential to powerful business interests in manifold ways. Where this is concerned editors and journalists operating within the mainstream are little better than "courtiers" of such interests, and indeed act much as if they were even when they are not simply because of the prevalence of centrist ideology in this media.

Consider certain aspects of the centrist ideology relevant here. There is the reality that the "pragmatic" centrist is not interested in figuring out objective reality, let alone solving pressing real-world problems. (Thus does the centrist believe, for example, that in society no one is more powerful than anyone else, that power is something "everyone" has so "no one" has it--a position any sane person should find risible.) What does concern them is the problem of maintaining "consensus" among those interests in society they see as legitimate and therefore as counting. Where people who do "count" are concerned they have a lot more respect for business than they do for scientists, and are as respectful of the concerns of the right as they are disrespectful of the left, regarding as they do the latter as illegitimate "ideologues" (centrists adhering to the pretense that "ideology" is a purely leftist sin).

Naturally the scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change impresses a centrist media less than it might someone whose primary concern was what is actually going on in the world, as centrists attend instead to what people say they think about that evidence. Moreover, in considering what they say their according so much more weight to the opinions of business relative to the opinions of scientists, and the opinions of the right as against the left--opinions that deny the problem entirely, or treat the problem as comparatively trivial, or anything else they come up with as they throw everything against the wall and see what will stick--has meant a treatment of the very existence of climate change as "debatable" decades after this position lost any intellectual credibility it may ever have had, and resulted in their giving an immense platform to "inactivism" in all its forms.

Taking all this into account one sees centrists' highly touted respect for expertise prove, at best, highly qualified, and at worst a piece of colossal hypocrisy--experts for whom they demand respect to be respected insofar as interests they respect much more do not oppose them; while the "both sidesism" that is supposedly a default mode for journalism is, as seen here, just a cover for letting powerful interests attack those promulgating facts that simply happen to be "inconvenient" from the standpoint of their bottom line. After all, we all know that on most issues, so far as the media is concerned, only one side is to be given a chance to speak--and any other is to be shut right out of "the conversation" without apology.