The L.A. Times has a newsbreaking interview with new Secretary of Energy Steven Chu in this morning’s paper. Secretary Chu gave the Times an exclusive Tuesday and the paper says he warned about the threats from climate change more “bluntly” and in more “dire terms” than he ever has before.
But don’t look for this big story on the front page because it’s not there. It’s buried in the California section and it’s given just a fraction of the ink that the “news” about the tiny town of Newman gets for its move to ban a book with too much cursing in it.
If you want to hear some real serious cursing you should be hearing the string your Creative Greenius is putting together over what a lousy job the Times is doing with the biggest story of our generation.
As usual, the Times buried the lead. It’s a quote from the Nobel prize winning Dr. Chu. You’ll find it in the final few paragraphs of the story. It should have been the headline and the Times should have recognized that the story is all about – them.
“I’M HOPING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WILL WAKE UP”
The Times wrote, “Chu made clear that he sees public education as a key part of the administration’s strategy to fight global warming” but the Times is clueless about their role in that education. They have effectively abandoned that role.
“I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen,” the Times quotes Chu as saying.
The Creative Greenius says, “The reason the American people haven’t gripped this and the reason they haven yet waken up is because newspapers like the L.A. Times have failed their basic journalistic responsibility to accurately report the story and inform the public about the facts.”
If you check the story out on the Times web site at http://www.latimes.com you’ll find it under the bone-headline: “Warming Called Threat To Farmers” Really makes you want to click through and get a grip, doesn’t it? Really makes you feel like they “get it” doesn’t it?
This same interview in which Chu warns about the possibility of 90% of the Sierra snowpack disappearing and taking the entire agriculture industry of California down along with it, is concluded by a quote from the discredited and shameful global warming denier poster boy, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, infamous for calling global warming a hoax.
This is nothing less than the equivalent of quoting the KKK’s view of black people in an article on civil rights.
Senator Inhofe and his point of view have zero support by any of the world’s respected scientists or any credible science association. By looking to Inhofe to “balance” their story with a predicable quote, the Times spews toxic waste all over itself.
Worse yet, in so doing, the Times endorses Inhofre’s wacko rants as a legitimate part of the conversation – which they are not.
Either the Times doesn’t know the difference between what accepted science and what a consensus by 99% of the experts in the field say is true – and what the Flat Earth Society fabricates, or they don’t think it matters.
Either way they do more harm than good as they continue to play the same cowardly stenographer’s role they assumed throughout their Bush league years.
This comes down to an issue of trust. Day after day the Los Angeles Times – and what’s left of the local newspaper industry – proves they cannot be trusted to tell us the news.
The up side is, with this week’s latest layoff of another 300 newspeople and the further shrinking of the already anorexic paper to even fewer pages, I won’t have the Times to kick around much longer.
Creative Greenius 