Evlondo Cooper on Climate Coverage / Rick Goldsmith on Stripped for Parts

KPFA - CounterSpin

This week on CounterSpin:

Climate disruption is the prime mover of a cascade of interrelated crises. We’re told that, when it comes to problems people need solved, rule number 1 is “follow the money.” Yet even as elite media talk about the climate crisis, they still … can’t … quite …connect images of floods or fires to the triumphant shareholder meetings of the fossil fuel companies.

Narrating the nightmare is not enough. We’ll talk about the latest research on climate coverage with Evlondo Cooper, senior writer at Media Matters.

Part of what FAIR’s been saying since our start in 1986 — when it was a fringe idea, that meant you were either alarmist or benighted or both — is that there is an inescapable conflict between media as a business and journalism as a public service. For a while, it was mainly about “fear and favor” — the ways corporate owners and sponsors influence the content of coverage. It’s more bare-knuckled now: Mass layoffs and takeovers force us to see how your local newspaper is really just an “asset” in a megacorporation’s portfolio, and will be treated that way — with zero evidence that a source of vital news and information is any different from a soap factory.

Rick Goldsmith’s new film is called Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink. We’ll hear from him about the film and the change it hopes to part of.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent coverage of Israel’s flour massacre.

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