By Fine Print Staff
The Obama Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency recently reversed a position that put 79 “mountaintop removal” projects on hold. For years, activists have been trying to end the leveling of Appalachia in search of cheap coal – a practice mostly ignored by the mainstream media until recently.
Scientists have courageously begun drawing attention to the devastation caused by mountaintop removal.The mostly poor residents of Appalachia face lung, kidney and liver damage as well as some of the highest cancer rates in the nation thanks to the damage reckless mining causes to the air they breathe and the water they drink (never mind the impact on wildlife). Interviews with these people, coupled with jarring footage of leveled mountains, would make for compelling TV, and probably stir the nation’s outrage. Instead, we get boring, industry-friendly drivel about the promise of “clean coal” from MSNBC – you know, America’s progressive news channel.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, sociologist Neil Postman warned about the poisonous effects television has on politics, education and the news. Anything that appears on TV is, ipso facto, entertainment. It can be nothing else; that’s the nature of the medium. Serious television, then, is especially insidious, because it masquerades as something meaningful. Enough has already been said about the cultural significance of Colbert and his colleagues at the Daily Show. Suffice to say that he seems to take Postman’s argument to heart – and turn it on its head.
Fox News doesn’t acknowledge environmental harm is a bad thing. CNN can only cover celebrities and politics-as-a-spectator sport. NBC is owned by GE, the world’s largest producer of coal-burning power plants. Nobody in “serious television” is in a position to give an issue like mountaintop removal the attention it deserves. Enter Colbert, who starts with the premise that his show is entertainment, and then brings in someone like Margaret Palmer, lead author of a recent study published in the journal Science that calls for an end to the harmful practice. The result makes for excellent television:
Without a doubt, that’s the most informative treatment the issue has received on American television, and perhaps the best discussion it’s gotten in our entire mainstream media, where objective journalism ensures the coal industry gets ample opportunity to air its views, no matter how baseless. They even mention the fact that more responsible mining practices would help create jobs in one of our country’s poorest regions, without dramatically increasing energy costs for consumers.
Through it all, Colbert remains wonderfully in character, accusing Palmer of “playing the ‘children and women’ card” and questioning whether the mountains deserve our sympathy, since they would surely blow us up too, given the chance. Not only are serious newscasters failing as journalists; they’ve forgotten how to play the part on TV.
Tags: environment • high • media