Media Lens: Silence is Green: The Green Movement And The Corporate Mass Media

February 3, 2005Leave a comment

3 February 2005 — MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

Media Lens: SILENCE IS GREEN The Green Movement And The Corporate Mass Media

Lethal Dreams

It is one of the great ironies of our time that, as evidence of environmental catastrophe has inexorably mounted, so the visibility of radical environmental movements has collapsed. In the late 1980s, public outrage at environmental devastation propelled the likes of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Green Party onto the media stage. With airwaves filled with endless talk of ‘going green’, BBC presenter John Humphrys declared he would flush his toilet less often to save water; Marks & Spencer’s posted green placards in their stores that read: “Please return your trolley – protect your environment.”

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‘Little boxes, little boxes … they’re all made out of ticky-tack’ By William Bowles

February 3, 2005Leave a comment

3 February 2005

Some years ago, I don’t remember where, I read that entire swathes of Indonesian rain forest were cut down simply to make cardboard boxes for Japanese consumer electronics; tvs, hi-fi’s, fridges and so forth. The stat staggered me, these were after all, just damn cardboard boxes destined to be trashed. Millions of these boxes are manufactured all over the planet every year, consuming who knows how many trees just to transport consumer products. Add in the foam plastic liners made from petroleum products then the oil consumed to transport them all around the planet and you have one, vast consumption machine that uses enough raw material and energy to run an entire country and then some.

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“Unlike the Latin American left, the pathetic European version has lost all sense of what it means to do politics. It does not try to propose concrete solutions to problems, and is only able to take moral stances, in particular denouncing dictators and human rights violations in grandiloquent tones. The social democratic left follows the right with at best a few years delay and has no ideas of its own. The “radical” left often manages both to denounce Western governments in every possible way and to demand that those same governments intervene militarily around the globe to defend democracy. Their lack of political reflection makes them highly vulnerable to disinformation campaigns and to becoming passive cheerleaders of US-NATO wars. That left has no coherent program and would not know what to do even if a god put them into power.” – Jean Bricmont