Hindustan Times On Gore's Speech: "It Didn't Happen"
Manu Sharma
Some of you might remember my previous encounter with media and climate change reporting. Apparently, things haven't changed much. The Al Gore speech did not get much mention in Indian print media (none at all in HT). So I wrote another post about it. Included below.
Thanks,
Manu
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Hindustan Times On Gore's Speech: "It Didn't Happen"
Despite Al Gore's Rock Star status, certain media organisations seem to have a thing or two against him. In the U.S. they have Fox News and in India it looks like Hindustan Times is keen to take on that role.
When Gore spoke in Washington on Thursday on the challenge to abandon fossil fuels, New York Times reported that the plan goes beyond even the most audacious ones. Bill McKibbon, journalist and climate activist went a step further when he said Gore deserved "the prize you get once you've won the Nobel." Nasa's leading climate scientist James Hansen called it "the turning point that is needed."
So how did Fox News report the challenge? Fox's reporting focused not on Gore's call but his personal emissions. Its reporter stood outside the Gore event and counted the number of minutes Gore's driver left the car on idle with the AC on to keep it cool when Gore and wife Tipper returned (it ran on idle for an earth destroying 20 minutes! The horror!).
Editors at Hindustan Times went a step further by pretending that Gore never spoke.
What Does HT Have Against Informed Public Opinion On Climate Change in India?
This isn't the first time Hindustan Times has negatively influenced the Indian public on climate change front. I consider deliberate omission of an important global event from its reporting as a negative influence. There are many many examples of omission on this front in the past. But there are also examples of deliberate negative influence. In early April, HT ran two ridiculous stories challenging man made global warming and discrediting the IPCC.
I exposed those stories on my blog and am currently suing the paper in the Press Council of India for publishing them. Its editor and correspondent have been served notices and I can't wait for the proceedings to begin. Have collected a wealth of evidence to share.
But let's give them some benefit of doubt and see if this omission was really intentional or caused by some other reason. Maybe it was too late for Friday's paper. Maybe they didn't have enough space. Maybe it wasn't relevant for Indian readers. Let's look at each of these reasoning.
"It was too late for Friday's paper"
Gore's speech began at 9.30 pm Indian time on Thursday and ended just before 10.00 pm. Okay that could have been a little close to their cut off time. But earlier in the day, around 5.30 pm Associated Press (AP) had released an interview with Gore previewing the speech. So there was plenty of time for the paper to run a story on Friday.
I was lucky enough to get hands on the AP story just as it was out and wrote about it around 6.00 pm. I found my hands on the actual transcript of the speech around 10, before Gore had finished delivering it in Washington. But by 9.00 pm itself, there were lots of media reports on Google News referencing the AP release. In fact, rival Times of India even published the AP story on Friday and mentioned it on the front page header too. So why did the Hindustan Times ignore it altogether?
Even if one accepts it was too late for Friday's paper, there can't be a reasonable explanation of its omission on Saturday as well, apart from it being intentional. TOI ran an editorial on it on Saturday. A full day after the speech was out when papers around the world were writing about it (1000+ mentions on Google News by now), India's leading newspaper pretends it didn't happen.
"They didn't have enough space"
A story as important as this deserves to create its own space pushing aside other less important ones. But perhaps there were other reports even more important that needed to be mentioned. Alright, lets see what else HT ran in the World section that day.
- World section, page 19 | Hindustan Times, New Delhi, Saturday, July 19, 2008
Main page
Happy Birthday, Mandela
India, China drive up Christie's sales
Osama's driver to be tried for war crimes
European terrorists trying to enter US
Ahead of Games, sex shops shut down
Pak terror groups getting bolder: US
Progress on Saarc varsity to be reviewed
Young's self-published 'The Shack' a hit
Sidebar
Nature's fury: typhoon kills 7 in Taiwan
Obama raises $52m in a month for campaign
Iran expects positive US presence at N-talks
Sex trade up in Oz during Pope's visit
Female suicide bomber held in Afganistan
Libyan sent to jail for lying about Afgan visit
Header
Emmy nominations
Python spins out of washing machine
World section, page 20
Desperate Housewives to end in three years
Want free gas? Name baby after radio station
"It wasn't relevant for Indian readers"
Looking at above stories, it's clear that wasn't the case. Climate change is a problem that will hit India severely. U.S and India share similar challenges in terms of moving from fossil fuels to clean energy sources.
The same is true for China and other Asian countries as well. So I looked up Chinese and Pakistani news publications to see whether they covered this issue. Turns out they did.
- South China Morning Post, China:
Gore's is a cry the whole world should heed
Xinhua News Agency, China:
Gore proposes carbon-free electricity production by 2018
UDN, Taiwan (translation):
高爾號召：10年內棄用石油 (source)
The News, Pakistan:
Al-Gore urges US to generate power with clean fuel
Clearly, there are some vested interests at work to ensure that public opinion in India remains uninformed or misinformed about climate change. The effort seems to be working. For example, most people in urban India, even those who consider themselves "environment friendly" do not grasp climate change mitigation potential of their actions or how far their actions go to address climate change, in other words.
Today's (Sunday's) paper, for example, contains a full-page feature titled "Green brigade: Even five-year-olds are doing their bit to counter the dangers of global warming." The stories in this feature are commendable and probably inspiring to some but are largely uninformed about what causes global warming and what kind of actions can address this issue.
Only one of the several examples mentioned in the three stories have something directly to do with lowering energy consumption. Others are about minimising waste generation, saving water, tree plantation, ozone depletion, air pollution, unemployment, recycling and cultural education.
All of these are most welcome and do lower CO2 emissions but only indirectly. They certainly cannot be clubbed together under the title of "examples that counter the dangers of global warming." Even if every kid in India did all of that (and they should!), we'd still be nowhere close to addressing global warming as long as we kept burning fossil fuels. Apparently, even seasoned reporters can't differentiate between good environmental practices and those that mitigate climate change.
I'd rather see real climate change news in the papers. Al Gore's energy challenge is likely to be a historic event in the fight against this issue as I wrote previously. I'd like some answers as to why Hindustan Times kept its readers in dark about it.
Notes
This entry was also made on, Whats With The Climate blog, Orange Hues blog, emailed to IYCN & Green-India discussion lists and copied to the following:
- Vir Sanghvi, Editorial Director Hindustan Times
HT correspondents: Kinjal Dagli, Shalini Singh and Chetan Chauhan
Dr. Rajendra K Pachauri, Director-General TERI
Sunita Narain, Director, Centre for Science and Environment
Bittu Sehgal, Editor, Sanctuary Magazine
Malini Mehra, Founder & Chief Executive, Centre for Social Markets
Manisha Dolia
Your thoughts are very pertinently stated and it is important to put this issue in the right perspective and challenge media which today almost dictates what we hear/see and what we do not. Media needs to get more responsible rather than being swayed by political interests.
Keep up th great work.
Regards,
Manisha
Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
Jerry Scovel
Manu Sharma
Thanks for your kind words. It's interesting that this kind of filtering of news to suit the agenda of vested interests works in very subtle and clever ways. It's not that HT does not report at all on climate change and green issues...they do, but the really scary scientific / economic reports or ones that call out for radical change, like the Al Gore challenge never find a mention.
Naom Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent argues that "the primary function of mass media is to mobilise public support for the special interests that dominate the government and the private sector." Here's an exceprt from Chomsky's interview that talks about how mass media does that...
Thanks,QUESTION: ... You outlined a model -- filters that propaganda is sent through, on its way to the public. Can you briefly outline those?
CHOMSKY: It's basically an institutional analysis of the major media, what we call a propaganda model. We're talking primarily about the national media, those media that sort of set a general agenda that others more or less adhere to, to the extent that they even pay much attention to national or international affairs.
Now the elite media are sort of the agenda-setting media. That means The New York Times, The Washington Post, the major television channels, and so on. They set the general framework. Local media more or less adapt to their structure.
And they do this in all sorts of ways: by selection of topics, by distribution of concerns, by emphasis and framing of issues, by filtering of information, by bounding of debate within certain limits. They determine, they select, they shape, they control, they restrict -- in order to serve the interests of dominant, elite groups in the society.
The New York Times is certainly the most important newspaper in the United States, and one could argue the most important newspaper in the world. The New York Times plays an enormous role in shaping the perception of the current world on the part of the politically active, educated classes. Also The New York Times has a special role, and I believe its editors probably feel that they bear a heavy burden, in the sense that The New York Times creates history.
That is, history is what appears in The New York Times archives; the place where people will go to find out what happened is The New York Times. Therefore it's extremely important if history is going to be shaped in an appropriate way, that certain things appear, certain things not appear, certain questions be asked, other questions be ignored, and that issues be framed in a particular fashion. Now in whose interests is history being so shaped? Well, I think that's not very difficult to answer.
[...]
We ask what would you expect of those media on just relatively uncontroversial, guided-free market assumptions? And when you look at them you find a number of major factors determining what their products are. These are what we call the filters, so one of them, for example, is ownership. Who owns them?
The major agenda-setting media -- after all, what are they? As institutions in the society, what are they? Well, in the first place they are major corporations, in fact huge corporations. Furthermore, they are integrated with and sometimes owned by even larger corporations, conglomerates -- so, for example, by Westinghouse and G.E. and so on.
So what we have in the first place is major corporations which are parts of even bigger conglomerates. Now, like any other corporation, they have a product which they sell to a market. The market is advertisers -- that is, other businesses. What keeps the media functioning is not the audience. They make money from their advertisers. And remember, we're talking about the elite media. So they're trying to sell a good product, a product which raises advertising rates. And ask your friends in the advertising industry. That means that they want to adjust their audience to the more elite and affluent audience. That raises advertising rates. So what you have is institutions, corporations, big corporations, that are selling relatively privileged audiences to other businesses.
Well, what point of view would you expect to come out of this? I mean without any further assumptions, what you'd predict is that what comes out is a picture of the world, a perception of the world, that satisfies the needs and the interests and the perceptions of the sellers, the buyers and the product.
Manu
Dear Manu,
Your thoughts are very pertinently stated and it is important to put this issue in the right perspective and challenge media which today almost dictates what we hear/see and what we do not. Media needs to get more responsible rather than being swayed by political interests.
Keep up the great work.
Regards,
Manisha
Wolverine
I agree , nut you must understand that in developing countries like
India the access to internet is limited to the educated middle class.
What about the masses?
In case you have to change the attitude of the people ( which is what
different organizations in India and other countries are trying) the
print media has to report it correctly.
I think a blitzkrieg on the electronic media can also be very useful.
Thanks
Ajinkya
Jerry Scovel
That does present a problem. There is no other way to reach the
masses than print newspapers? In America and Europe talk radio is a
good way to reach the masses. It has been 40 years since I was in
India so please forgive my ignorance on current conditions.
Jerry.
Wolverine
Well its not really that bad.
Talk radios are popular but I am not sure stations are educated enough
to introduce such programs.
Ajinkya
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Jerry Scovel
Economic reality is that they will run any program that will pay
for their time, greed is a powerful incentive.
Jerry.