your teevee hates you and wants you to die
You're ready for prime time, America!
With California sweltering on the left coast and much of the midwest underwater, Democracy Now! spent a segment or two last week highlighting the global warming disconnect in the coverage of flooding along the Mississippi and this summer's ominous, emerging weather patterns - what television news has been calling "extreme weather."
The good folks at DN! are right to point a finger - mostly in the direction of teevee - for neglecting the Big Story, even when while the networks and the cable talking heads have been running footage on the hour of reporters standing alongside sunken levees, or the feds issue reports which say the very things that have been happening over the last week will be the new normal in a post-global warming America.
But teevee news eats the context necessary to tell these kinds of stories. Because context equals time, and television news is hemmed in by a need to cram as many ads into the half-hour as possible, a lack of context therefore is what keeps the industry going. Thus, in the world described by television news, there is no real group narrative, no actual community the viewer belongs to. Things happen, and then other things happen, and then some other things happen, and these things may have a who or a what or a why and a how, but are validated only by the fact someone is around to point a camera or I-phone at them, nothing more. Nothing connects them, or the viewer to them, beyond this.
Global warming is about shifting our present circumstances away from what it's been for the last few thousand years into something new entirely (or old, depending on your point of view); a change in context. In the meantime, outside of a very shallow, very narrow perspective, television news can't even tell us what's going on now.
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