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hatrack

(59,446 posts)
Thu Jun 9, 2016, 09:39 PM Jun 2016

A "Murrow Moment"? Hardly. Deafening Silence Prevails On Trump's Lethal Climate Bullshit

The mainstream media has begun to call Donald Trump out for racism, as HuffPost notes in banner headlines. But Donald Trump is also a climate science denier — and the mainstream media mostly ignores it. Obviously racism and climate denial are very different things. Racism has been harming vast numbers of people for centuries. Many have called it “America’s original sin.” The worst harms of climate denial lay ahead — though the gravest danger also happens to be to the poor and disenfranchised.

I bring this question up because racism and climate denial do, in their own way, both pose an existential threat to the idea of America — and because the pushback on Trump’s racist statements is being trumpeted as the media’s “Murrow Moment.”

EDIT

Even once-reticent climatologists have been speaking out for years because, as Dr. Lonnie Thompson has written, “Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.” Some climatologists, like James Hansen and Jason Box, have joined direct action and been arrested for it. Scientists have been ratcheting up their warnings year after year as the dangers posed by unrestricted carbon pollution become more and more undeniably obvious. In response, international moral leaders, like Pope Francis, have built upon that ever-strengthening scientific understanding to argue that climate inaction is itself immoral.

EDIT

Yet Donald Trump can proclaim the wackiest of anti-science climate denier talking points for months, and in 20 debates, the media asked him precisely zero questions about this greatest of all preventable threats to America. Trump proclaims “We’re going to cancel the Paris climate agreement” -- humanity’s best if not only chance to avoid catastrophic irreversible climate change lasting 1000 years -- and the media treats it as a one-day story if they cover it at all.

Ed. - Emphasis added.

Consider the Huffington Post itself, which has been better than 99 percent of major media outlets in terms of consistently explaining to the public the catastrophic risks posed by climate inaction -- and better than 99 percent of major media outlets in terms of consistently explaining to the public the risks posed by a Trump presidency. Yet even HuffPost does not list Trump's climate denial and his plan to block national and global climate action in the "Editor's Note" they post at the end of every story on Donald Trump (emphasis in original):

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims -- 1.6 billion members of an entire religion -- from entering the U.S.

EDIT

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/06/09/3786515/media-trump-racism-climate-denial/

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