Extinction Rebellion

By SETH SANDRONSKY

The media is the message. That is close to the phrasing, “The medium is the message,” according to Marshall McLuhan. In the case of climate change, media’s message of this threat to make human life extinct on planet earth is a problem of underreporting. On a day of extinction rebellion protests against the climate crisis in 33 countries worldwide, activists in Sacramento, the capital city of Calif., rallied at six media outlets: five TV stations—ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC and Univision—and The Sacramento Bee, a daily paper.

Susan Roberts Emery is the spokesperson for the Extinction Rebellion activists in the Sacramento area. The group’s main message was for commercial media newsrooms to improve their coverage of climate change. The Golden State is a kind of ground zero for weather-related incidents. The horrific wildfires in the south and north areas of the state last year are recent cases in point.

The media people we spoke with told us to keep sending them our news releases, Roberts Emery told The Progressive Populist. “We spoke with a security guard who told us of a family member perishing during a south state wildfire last year,” she said.

The story of the Sacramento-area climate activists visiting media outlets did not garner a single mention in the local news the next day. However, there was near saturation coverage of the Notre-Dame Cathedral fire in Paris, France. Apparently, some events are more newsworthy than the one, climate change, threatening to destroy the biosphere upon which all life depends.

In *Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media* (1988), Noam Chomsky and the late Edward Herman propose a model of news performance that explains how it must go through five filters to see the light of day. Corporate advertising is one filter, with the fossil fuel industry’s power and wealth exerted in ways big and small on climate change reporting, in the current case mostly via omission.

Chomsky and Herman write of “advertising as the primary income source of the mass media.” Therefore, their reliance fosters a role of deference before such advertisers. In the current era of old school media losing ad revenue to multinationals such as Facebook, Chomsky and Herman’s analysis is perhaps more powerful on ads filtering the news. (See https://chomsky.info/consent01/)

Protests against fossil fuel power to shape commercial media coverage of climate change is of course part of movement politics. A few observations follow that premise.

Protests alone will not force media outlets to, say, devote more resources to covering climate change, as some progressive outlets do. Strikes on the other hand are a time-honored tactic of forcing the powerful and wealthy to make concessions to everybody else. Likewise, so are walkouts, with youth climate change leaders in front. Consumer boycotts are another effective means of changing policies and politics towards a progressive, people-centered view, and away from the business-as-usual profits first and devil take the hindmost.

Bringing the humanity-threatening subject of climate change to the fore is the Green New Deal (GND). A resolution in both houses of Congress, the GND proposes a 10-year mobilization to decarbonize the US economy. Why? There is a scientific consensus that carbon emissions are cooking the earth’s biosphere, and there is a short time for such action to avert a planetary catastrophe, according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment.

In brief, we are up against the clock. Therefore, we need to proceed rapidly and smartly. Making media reveal such truths rather than to cover them up is a primary terrain of struggle in the local and global struggle for a sustainable future.

Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.

From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2019

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