Six out of seven episodes of the BBC's "Frozen Planet" are just fine for American consumption, so deems the Discovery Channel. The seventh, about climate change? Not so much.
Yesterday I discussed the soft censorship of the world as it is in the name of profit. The idea being that there is probably not a vast conspiracy to misinform or push the rest of the world to the back burner, but that instead more fluff-filled stories sell more magazines, and thus there is a positive feedback loop. This selective re-displaying of the world as it is extends beyond straight “news”, too. Frozen Planet, the latest excellent nature-in-HD production from the BBC, is a seven-episode documentary of life as it is at our polar regions – detailing the surprising diversity and amount of life that exists in climates that we would normally see as inhospitable and deadly. The same producers behind The Blue Planet and Planet Earth were also behind this series, which is currently airing on BBC One as a seven part series. The show is also being offered up for networks around the world to air. In the United States, the program will be aired by the Discovery Channel with one slight omission – about one-seventh of the series.
While the Discovery Channel found plenty of room to air the first six episodes in the series, the seventh – titled “On Thin Ice” and dealing with the subject matter of climate change and its effects on the poles – was just too much for the network to handle. For its part the Discovery Channel said that not airing the seventh episode wasn’t because of any attempt to not inform their viewers about the very real and happening-right-now effects of climate change, it was instead because of a “scheduling issue so only had slots for six episodes”.
What there is time for include shows about criminals that got caught, a show purporting to answer “the most fundamental questions facing the world today” but winds up with episodes like “Why is Sex Fun?”, a show about killing Osama Bin Laden, motorcycles, guns, and so on…
You would think message control would be more difficult with so many outlets.
Picking on cable television “news” is way, way too easy. With the exception of BBC News and Al Jazeera English – both of which you’ll be extremely hard pressed to find in their actually-transmitted 24-hour format, the selection of “news” programming available to Americans at best are fact-based shows wrapped in deep layers of opinion and spin. This is sadly expected these days – it’s the norm. Should a network arise that promises to report actual news on a 24-hour basis it would appear “cutting edge” and “different”.
One has to travel outside the media available to this country to see how truth and fact is being manipulated, slightly spun, or deflected far away enough from the spotlight that it misses critical public awareness it needs. Fortunately, some media makes it far too simple to stand back and look at the selective manipulation of reality that is packaged and sold to us.
Ignorance on parade. With media coverage, no less.
Long before the Occupy Wall Street protests vaulted the canned response of “shut up and get a job” or “go occupy a job” into the quick response lexicon, there was a data-filled and depressing reality seemingly just out of range of day-to-day view: the jobs aren’t there, and they’re coming back far too slowly.
There have been eleven recessions since the end of World War II. Until our current recession, the worst seen was the recession immediately after World War II, in 1947. In a thirteen month period, the economy lost 5.2% of its jobs. These losses weren’t driven quite as much by a terrible economy as they were by minorities and women being displaced from the workforce as men returned from overseas theaters to go back to their normal lives. Still, the drop in demand from no more war production was a drag, and if it wasn’t for the Marshall Plan in Europe to reignite demand, it is possible the 1950′s could have played out a lot differently than they are romantically remembered in Americana. Employment had returned to pre-recession levels within 11 months.
In terms of length and depth though, the job recession that began in 2007 far exceeds 1947 and is truly the worst seen since the Great Depression. It took twenty-five months to get from the start to the recession low of 6.4% of jobs lost. Worst still, it has been a full twenty months since reaching that point, and we still sit at 4.7% jobs lost. So far in this “recovery”, the economy has only grown 125,000 jobs per month. If that rate is extrapolated on top of the data we already have, it will take an additional 52 months from now to reach pre-recession employment, or about February 2016. If the economy started picking up in a more meaningful way, say adding 200,000 jobs per month, it still won’t be until July 2014 – 33 months from now – until pre-recession numbers are seen.
Better put, you are here:
At the current rate jobs are being added to the economy, pre-recession employment will not be seen until February 2016. A more optimistic view still leaves that date in July of 2014.
Early on the morning of November 15, the New York Police Department evicted hundreds who were maintaining a protest camp in Lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park since September 17.
For well over two months the Occupy Wall Street movement – around-the-clock protests starting at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan and inspiring like-protests in other cities across the nation, have struggled against well-entrenched headwinds that any longer-than-a-day movement against the status quo should expect to meet and then some. They’ve been called a group with no real stated set of demands or goals, in spite of a rather comprehensive list of grievances.
Pot shots have been taken from the indifferent and the vehemently against. Why should a protest do nothing but fail if it has its own faults, if it doesn’t have a perfect answer to all the world’s problems, if you don’t like the way some of the protesters are dressed, if the presence of hipsters and hippies gives you license to judge an entire group of people out of your own sense of superiority, if the left wing being present gives you a case of the willies, or if in order to have an opinion to state you must have a verified encyclopedia of facts, charts, posters, and data in-tow at all times that is bulletproof and infallible enough to be carved into a stone tablet. Or heck – maybe it’s just because the boat doesn’t need to be rocked. The boat is taking on water, listing, and a life jacket would be prudent, but I’m sure if you just wait long enough invisible forces will prevent this capsizing all on their own.
There is the other type of headwind – the headwind that doesn’t come from opinions of the online commentariat or the television heads of our punditocracy – but from the very real and physical resistance: a resistance that is delivered in the form of uniformed officers, batons, pepper spray, non-lethal rounds that literally crack skulls, military-grade sound cannons, buoyed by (among some) a joyous attitude looking forward to inflict pain on those taking part in a rite of democracy.
Our world is awash in causality. These protesters are not here because they’re bored, they don’t have anything better to do, or because everyone decided starting in September it would be a great idea to run a 24/7 protest just for the hell of it. The cause for these protests are readily visible when you consider the response. At its core, Occupy Wall Street protests the gigantic financial firms that threatened to obliterate the economy through derivatives-based Wall Street side-bets. When those side-bets, conducted in purely unregulated parts of the market, burned down around them the American people were asked for $700 billion straight up with no strings attached, or face an institutional collapse of the banking system. Firms got the money they needed and the economy has limped along ever since. As a result of that extraction of wealth from the American citizenry there have been no trials, no indictments, no trust busting, no criminal prosecution of any kind for the gross negligence needed to create this crisis in the first place. If the same amount of effort put into policing and suppressing Occupy Wall Street was turned on the outrageously irresponsible practices of the firms that got us into this mess, there would be no need for Occupy Wall Street. Plain and simple.
Former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno poses with Jerry Sandusky, left. Sandusky used Penn State's facilities to sexually abuse young boys apparently with the knowledge of top school officials.
Egregious. Unbelievable. Tragic. Angering. Devastating. Some of the myriad of words that can be used to describe the reactions of many to the revelation of a stunning sexual abuse scandal & cover-up involving one of one of the most famous universities in the country. On November 5th, barely anyone had heard the name “Jerry Sandusky” and no one in their right mind thought that the long time head coach of Penn State University’s football program, Joe Paterno, would do anything but continue to coach out the rest of this season and into the next – the timeless pillar of Penn State football he was.
Devastating news revealed in a grand jury investigation turned the world of collegiate sports on its head last week, making every scandal in memory seemingly fade into the darkness and shrink to nothing in the face of what transpired in State College, Pennsylvania.
Jerry Sandusky, a former defensive coordinator for Penn State, retired at the oddly young (for coaching) age of 55 back in 1999. Despite being a talented coordinator, his coaching career abruptly ended, and he went on to focus more time and energy on his charity, Second Mile. Founded in 1977, the purpose of the charity was to help troubled young boys. Sandusky was allowed to maintain and office at Penn State football headquarters and retained full access to the school’s athletic facilities. As more and more digging has been done into this story, it appears that these post-retirement gifts of access bestowed upon him were after there were already allegations of Sandusky sexually assaulting an underage boy in the team’s shower in 1998. That might be where the first cover-up comes in, as campus police never referred it to the real police, or any authorities of any kind.