Global Distortions
Corporate protectionism through disproportionate news coverage
Most of the news media is either corporate owned or heavily tied to corporatism. This is a big problem because they have a huge influence over what society ends up thinking is important. And media coverage tends to be generally favourable to corporatism.
The relentless focus on Brexit in news media is an interesting example of this in action. Through giving Brexit a disproportionate focus, corporate media removes from the limelight, certain forces and aspects of capitalism that have put us at such peril and intend to push us perilously further.
Journalists have huge responsibilities, but they consistently fail to exercise those responsibilities within the corporate media structure. This is, more often than not, not actually deliberate, but the outcomes remain the same.
Take climate change, for example. It is the biggest threat facing life on this planet as we know it. Growing evidence suggests we are now experiencing “climate breakdown”. Growing evidence says we need to take urgent and drastic measures (of which there can be many positive consequences to taking — see https://leapmanifesto.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Manifesto-en.pdf) to mitigate the impact of man-made climate change. Yet, if you follow much of the news media in the UK, you would think the biggest issue that we should concern ourselves with right now is Brexit.
Please do not misunderstand me. Brexit is a very big issue. But the UK leaving the European Union is not, realistically speaking, a direct potential existential threat to nearly all animal species on Earth, including humans. Climate change is.
When I contemplate how much the media get to dictate what we think is important and just how important, it is no wonder that I have repeatedly heard people saying that Brexit is the biggest political issue of our lifetime/s.
The coverage in news media has been completely distorted in focus. I would hazard a guess that more people in the UK have said that Brexit is the biggest political issue of our lifetime in the last five years than they have about climate change/global warming in the last 30 years.
I’ll carry out a fairly quick experiment to really drill home my point about how distorted the coverage is. But first, a few important points to highlight…
Brexit as a word was only coined in 2012. And it only entered common usage in 2015. Global warming and climate change have been, at the very least, fairly well known terms since at least the late 1980's. So that’s over 30 years of global warming and climate change usage, versus five years of Brexit.
Yet, just look at the number of Google search results in online British news media websites of articles/pages featuring that word in comparison to articles/pages from some the same respective websites featuring the words “climate change” or “global warming”. It’s astonishing.
Note: Some of you may applaud The Guardian for having overall more articles about climate change, but The Guardian website has a much bigger and fuller archive of articles than most, if not all, the other major news media websites. So if you consider that articles about Brexit are only going to feature from 2015, then there’s very little to celebrate.
Okay, that’s Britain for you. And you might say: “Of course British news media are going to focus on Brexit — it’s not surprising it features more highly.” But the problem of how disproportionate news media’s attention to Brexit is over climate change and global warming is not just a British problem; it’s a world problem.
I carried out the same test again looking at the websites of well-known newspapers from a range of other countries, using translated terms where appropriate. Take a close look:
The grossly distorted coverage of a hugely important issue weakens our collective abilities to mitigate damage, prevent catastrophic consequences, and transform our economies and societies to something profoundly more equitable and fair — improving many people’s lives in the process.
The world deserves better.
