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October 22, 2016 at 12:22 am #55754wvParticipant
Commentary: Debates pitch climate change shutout.
A few decades from now, when the realities of climate change have hushed even the loudest, densest deniers, we may look back on October 2016 as the month political journalism died.
October 19, 2016
Peter Dykstra
Environmental Health NewsOn Wednesday evening during the final presidential debate of the campaign, Hell did not freeze over. Moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News, where climate denial plays nothing but home games, passed on the final opportunity to ask Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton about climate change.
This presidential campaign has been a catastrophe for American democracy and for American political journalism.
Amid the relentlessly tawdry campaign news, most Americans haven’t even noticed the absence of virtually any high-level campaign discussion of environmental issues, let alone what many have called the biggest challenge of the 21st century.
For now.
But I invite you to think ahead to that “oh-crap” moment that awaits us all, 5, 10, or 25 years from now when America looks back to reckon with our self-imposed climate silence in the debates.
Journalism —and the memes of our day— have failed us.
I don’t mean to condemn all journalists, or even all political journalists. This campaign has seen Pulitzer-worthy investigative work, notably by old-media giants like the New York Times and Washington Post, on both major party candidates and their respective problems with veracity and transparency. But the horse-race coverage, driven by Twitter, bluster and clickbait, has predictably left important issues in the lurch.
Horse-race coverage, driven by Twitter, bluster and clickbait, has predictably left important issues in the lurch.Those who are interested in climate change, environment, and energy shouldn’t take it personally. Income equality, housing costs, guns, privacy, prisons, drugs, national security, food and agriculture, and just about everything overseas that’s not ISIS are in the same neglected boat.
David Prasad/flickrThe presidential debates used to be the best opportunity to shed some light on all these things. But as the debates have gone from substance to showbiz, it doesn’t work that way anymore. Let’s look at why.
Debate decline
Aside from the “Town Hall” debates—where carefully selected members of the public get to ask questions—you have to go back to 1992 to find a non-TV journalist doing the interrogating at a presidential debate. That was the last election year in which a panel of reporters posed questions to the candidates. Perhaps print journalists don’t fare as well on TV, but it could also be argued that TV journalists don’t always fare well with journalism.
Since then, every journalist’s debate question has come from a network TV anchor or political correspondent. That’s six election cycles, 18 presidential debates where every question came from a well-compensated news celebrity based in New York or Washington. They conduct the debates under the auspices of a non-partisan commission that’s currently led by former Republican National Committee Chairman Frank Fahrenkopf and Mike McCurry, Bill Clinton’s former Press Secretary. If that’s not an inside job, I don’t know what is.
I read every debate transcript back to 1960. Let’s take the October 28, 1980, debate between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan: The moderator was from ABC, and the questioners were from US News & World Report, the Oregonian, the Christian Science Monitor, and ABC. The questions were on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; defense spending, politics in the Persian Gulf; inflation and unemployment; balancing the federal budget; crime, urban blight and race relations; the Iranian hostage crisis; terrorism; nuclear weapons; oil imports and OPEC; air pollution; Social Security; Medicare; and women’s rights.
The transcript notes no interruptions or petty feuds between the candidates. Ronald Reagan did not threaten to jail Jimmy Carter if elected, nor did President Carter dwell on the topic of p**** grabbing.
What a snooze. But until this year’s three presidential pie fights, it was the biggest presidential debate audience in U.S. history. So the argument that American viewers can’t handle substance when it’s offered to them doesn’t hold up.
For the record, the last, and one of only two, climate change questions ever posed by a journalist at a presidential debate was October 15, 2008. Bob Schieffer of CBS asked about “energy and climate control.” Props to Senator John McCain for gently correcting the moderator and realizing that the question was not about commercial property storage facilities. Then both he and Senator Barack Obama pretty much ducked the climate part of the question and talked about reducing foreign oil imports.
This year’s second debate offered prime evidence of how easily we’re distracted by bright, shiny objects:
What was the question again?
Audience member Ken Bone came closer to anyone in asking a climate-related question in this year’s second debate: “What steps will your energy policy take to meet our energy needs, while at the same time remaining environmentally friendly, and minimizing job loss for fossil power plant workers?”
Clinton mentioned climate change and clean energy in her response; Trump touted the heavily damaged concept of “clean coal,” and promised a thousand years of coal mining—a prospect that even many miners find to be hallucinatory.
The Internet blew up—not because an energy question was asked, but because Citizen Bone, a walking, talking Russian nesting doll in a bright red sweater—was so damned adorable.
Bone appeared with CNN’s Carol Costello the morning after. She asked about his red sweater, his Internet fame, his recent weight gain, and the poise and body language of the candidates. There was no mention of his bringing a substantive question to the party.
Same deal on Fox & Friends, where Ken was declared to have “won over all of our hearts.” Bone tried gamely to raise his energy concerns, but host Steve Doocy deftly steered the discussion back to The Sweater.
NBC’s Today Show added that Ken Bone’s red sweater had sold out overnight on Amazon.com, presaging an outbreak of Ken Bone Halloween costumes.
Bone did a CNN encore with Anderson Cooper Monday night. Since Cooper was one of the debate moderators, it might have been a good opportunity to disclose that Ken Bone is employed by the Prairie State Energy Campus in southern Illinois, a struggling “clean coal” project. But the clock ran out before The Sweater discussion did. No time here for an energy chat, or even standard journalistic full disclosure.
On Tuesday, ABC’s Good Morning America played a clip from the previous night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live—all sweater, but they cut out the part where Kimmel made a fleeting reference to energy.
Wait, what was the question again?
Pee tests, flag salutes, and draft dodging
Ephemeral, fatuous issues are surely nothing new. In the 1980’s, candidates were pressured to submit urine samples to confirm that they weren’t drug users. In 1988, George H.W. Bush pounced on the hapless Michael Dukakis for a clumsy-but-legally-correct stance on the Pledge of Allegiance. And in virtually every modern presidential race through 2008, military service—war heroes, draft dodgers and swift boaters—loomed large. Those three are among many issues that have vanished completely. But at least they shared the stage with more substantive talk, instead of hogging the stage as they often do now.
The decision by news organizations— particularly TV news—to flee from informing the public in favor of holding their attention through fear or diversion isn’t the only reason that things have gone downhill. But it’s a major reason. Our collective attention span for serious issues is so small it can no longer be seen by the naked eye. The way the news is delivered, particularly on television, enables this.
When debates veer off into petty conflict, and literally he-said/she-said combat, two entities benefit: network ratings, and candidates who don’t bother to prepare for substantive questions.
Our nation is already paying. A few decades from now, when the realities of climate change have hushed even the loudest, densest deniers, we may look back on October 2016 as the month political journalism died because we couldn’t bring ourselves to have a serious national conversation on topics that affect our lives.
EHN welcomes republication of our stories, but we require that publications include the author’s name and Environmental Health News at the top of the piece, along with a link back to EHN’s version.
For questions or feedback about this piece, contact Brian Bienkowski at bbienkowski@ehn.org.
October 22, 2016 at 12:42 am #55756ZooeyModeratorI wonder if Amazon will restock those sweaters soon.
October 22, 2016 at 10:21 am #55773wvParticipantIs Trump the “first demagogue of the Anthropocene” ?
The Atlantic:https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/10/trump-the-first-demagogue-of-the-anthropocene/504134/
“…….So to now watch a demagogue contest the presidency, running a campaign that appeals to racism and xenophobia, has felt less like the sudden apparition of an unfathomable nightmare and more like the early realization of a seasonal forecast. You can hear the long-predicted gusts, the rain pounding on the roof and the groaning thunder. It’s all just happening four decades earlier than the weather person said.
So I want to propose a new way of understanding Donald Trump. He not only represents a white racial backlash, and he has not only opened the way for an American extension of the European far right. Insofar as his supporters are drawn to him by a sense of global calamity, and insofar as his rhetoric singles out the refugee as yet another black and brown intruder trying to violate the nation’s cherished borders, Trump is the first demagogue of the Anthropocene.
We should take Trump at his word when he calls Syrian refugees “one of the great Trojan horses,” or when his son bizarrely describes them as Skittles that “will kill you.” In Europe, Trump’s far-right kin have long blurred the differences between legal immigration, Islamist terrorism, and the refugees fleeting the Syrian War. After the Paris attacks last year, one leader of the French far-right National Front said, “Today, we can see that immigration has become favorable terrain for the development of Islamism.”
This xenophobia is grounded in real-life trends. I will focus on two in particular: moribund economic growth and the mass migration of non-white people. Both will likely intensify as the planet warms. (A third vital trend—the political and cultural upheaval of the U.S. racial hierarchy—will not vary with climate change.)
First, climate change could easily worsen the inequality that has already hollowed out the Western middle class. A recent analysis in Nature projected that the effects of climate change will reduce the average person’s income by 23 percent by the end of the century. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency predicts that unmitigated global warming could cost the American economy $200 billion this century. (Some climate researchers think the EPA undercounts these estimates.)
Future consumers will not register these costs so cleanly, though—there will not be a single climate-change debit exacted on everyone’s budgets at year’s end. Instead, the costs will seep in through many sources: storm damage, higher power rates, real-estate depreciation, unreliable and expensive food. Climate change could get laundered, in other words, becoming just one more symptom of a stagnant and unequal economy. As quality of life declines, and insurance premiums rise, people could feel that they’re being robbed by an aloof elite.
They won’t even be wrong. It’s just that due to the chemistry of climate change, many members of that elite will have died 30 or 50 years prior….see link
October 22, 2016 at 11:19 am #55775ZooeyModeratorAs quality of life declines, and insurance premiums rise, people could feel that they’re being robbed by an aloof elite.
They won’t even be wrong. It’s just that due to the chemistry of climate change, many members of that elite will have died 30 or 50 years prior….see link
Yup. The people pushing the policies that are creating this will not be the ones to suffer the consequences.
October 22, 2016 at 11:52 am #55778sdramParticipantInteresting article. I recall that HRC referenced it in debate #2 but there have been no formal debate questions about it for a long time. Her words started by outlining Trumps denial position and her position. But, no question was asked.
Headline is Climate Change Treated as Afterthought in Second Presidential Debate
October 22, 2016 at 1:42 pm #55784ZooeyModeratorThe greatest success of the oil industry is not that they have made so many Americans doubt the science of global warming, but that they have managed to completely bury the discussion of it. With the amount of emphasis it gets, you would think that as an issue, it has about the same level of importance as … I dunno. Common core, or potholes, or something. In fact, judging by media coverage, the most pressing issues in America are
Trump’s latest faux pas
Clinton’s emails
Terrorism
ImmigrationI didn’t watch any of the 3 debates. Am I missing something?
Remember when Sanders was still around, and people were talking about universal health care, college costs, the minimum wage, and wealth disparity? You know…issues that matter.
And, you know, character DOES matter. So that is legitimate. But it was more appealing when actual economic, social, and foreign policy issues were in the headlines.
I hate to be a broken record, but it really feels like the whole thing is sliding down the sewer. The planet is being destroyed by greed and a lust for power. Those two sins have always plagued humans, but technological advances, population growth, and environmental degradation have upped the stakes to a critical level, and we are tipping towards the drain, and I can’t think of one single reason to hope that the slide will be anything other than a Cormac McCarthy nightmare.
October 22, 2016 at 5:09 pm #55792wvParticipant… environmental degradation have upped the stakes to a critical level, and we are tipping towards the drain, and I can’t think of one single reason to hope that the slide will be anything other than a Cormac McCarthy nightmare.
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Shoot Zooey, Hillary and the Dems will fix things.
w
vlink:https://theintercept.com/2016/10/19/democratic-sen-chuck-schumer-says-top-priority-for-next-year-is-giant-corporate-tax-cut/
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, likely to be majority leader next year if Democrats take back the Senate, told CNBC Tuesday that one of his top two 2017 priorities would be an enormous corporate tax cut.Speaking of himself in the third person, Schumer said that “we’ve got to get things done…
……For his part, Schumer has long been negotiating with Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman to lay the groundwork for such a corporate-friendly deal.While Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren has called such a scheme “a giant wet kiss for the tax dodgers,” Schumer told CNBC that he’d have no trouble getting her on board. “She’s going to surprise everybody,” Schumer said. “She’s going to be both a progressive and a constructive force.”
=============Democracy Deferred: Ohio Removes Anti-Fracking Measures From County Ballots
link:http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38063-democracy-deferred-ohio-removes-anti-fracking-measures-from-county-ballots
“…Ohioans are not nearly as conservative as their gerrymandered state legislature might have one think. To fight back, many progressive Ohioans are going local to make gains on issues like the minimum wage and fracking. For this reason, the local ballot initiative process — by which citizens write, petition for and vote on legislation — has taken on increased significance. But after years of local battles, the future of this basic mode of resistance is in jeopardy.This September, county-level “community bills of rights” in Medina, Portage, Athens and Meigs were removed from these Ohio counties’ respective ballots, despite all four gathering enough signatures to qualify for the ballot….”
================link:https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19102016/cafo-epa-regulations-factory-farms-get-bigger-pollution-grows-environmental-impact-methane
Factory Farms Get Bigger, Pollution Grows, but Regulators Don’t Even Know Where They Are
“If you look at the trajectory over the last 20 years, it’s going in one direction and it’s going there fast. It’s terrifying to watch,” said Abel Russ, an attorney with the Environmental Integrity Project, which has sued the EPA for CAFO information. “They just keep getting bigger and more concentrated. There’s no limiting factor.”==============
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