> "My role was to identify the voices that were not in the mainstream and to give those voices a stage," Rheem says. [...]<p>> He says the media was hungry for these perspectives.<p>> "Journalists were actually actively looking for the contrarians. It was really feeding an appetite that was already there."<p>A rare example of the BBC breaking the media omertà on itself here. You thought journalism was supposed to help you understand the world? Nope, reading our slop will actually make you *less* able to make informed decisions.<p>There was a good paper written about this all the way back in 2007 [1]. Makes for some eyebrow-raising reading in the year-of-our-lord 2022.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/publications/downloads/boykoff07-geoforum.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/publications/downloads/boykoff07-ge...</a>
People will help make Earth unlivable for half a million dollars :( To me, this is a more grave crime than murder, and yet our socioeconomic system rewards it.
> He maintains that climate science was too uncertain in the 1990s to warrant "drastic actions", and that developing countries - particularly China and Russia - have ultimately been responsible for the decades of climate inaction, rather than American industry.<p>This is such a classic at this point. "Look, even if we are partly responsible, and way ahead in per capita terms, look at how <i>others</i> are doing overall".<p>I feel that this kind of hypocrisy has permeated down from geopolitical excuses, to the common people, who are now blamed, very publicly so, when it comes to essentially any kind of pollution, from air travel to plastic use.
> On an early autumn day in 1992, E Bruce Harrison, a man widely acknowledged as the father of environmental PR, stood up in a room full of business leaders and delivered a pitch like no other.<p>Sadly, the article makes no mention of his wife Patricia, who has run the Corporation for Public Broadcasting since 2005.
This is a good book about that sort of business.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt</a>
There were grass roots activists already talking about these issues, several years before these people got together. The GCC was <i>professional</i> lobbyists and advocates jumping on a market they just discovered existed.
it is high time we called 'PR' what it is - corporate propaganda - in order to strip the discipline of the legitimacy it somehow retains. It's basically paid for BS, and when it comes to climate change, everyone is going to be paying the price