| A brief research project suggests that the role of mainstream news media in this country is to create cultural amnesia.
When news is put into context, the content is often removed to fit the current political climate. This helps to ensure that democracy is not a continual process where the electorate becomes more educated and involved in political process – rather, by attempting to remain objective and simply comment on political processes, news media ensure all politics remain partisan. However, many are not.
The Kyoto agreement on climate change serves this illustration well. Human-produced, anthropogenic climate change is not a partisan issue, nor is it political per se. It goes beyond the doctrinal democracy of voters’ rights as it affects those generations not yet born. To focus on one of the many nonpolitical issues, the role of the media has been to make Kyoto a political issue, all but omitting the environmental story associated with global warming. What is left is partisan politics.
In 2003, Robert Babe, who holds a research chair in media studies at the University of Western Ontario, carried out a research project to analyze newspaper discourses on the environment. Keeping generally to Canada’s "premier" national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, he discovered that the majority of the coverage on Kyoto was negative, political (not environmental), and analyzed the economic costs of implementing the accord (not the benefits). But most interesting is that four years ago there was a "made-in-Canada solution" to global warming proposed by an industry lobby group, an approach that is now being promoted by Harper’s Conservatives (at the time it was proposed, the only Conservative plan was to reduce smog in Toronto – a vote-getter – because Harper was not convinced of the science behind Kyoto).
Presently, the Conservative government is renouncing the Kyoto Accord, saying its targets are not reachable, despite contradictory data. The legality of reneging on the accord and the steep economic penalties aside, the irony is that it is the cost of Kyoto that Conservatives say they fear. As Babe reports, responding to Chrétien’s ratification of the accord in the fall of 2002, a collective of 35 business groups, including the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, formed the Canadian Coalition for Responsible Environmental Solutions. "At the peak of its campaign this coalition, assisted by National Public Relations, was spending a quarter of a million dollars a week on television ads advocating a ‘made-in-Canada solution’ instead of Kyoto." To bring us into 2006, Environment Minister Rona Ambrose recently stood up in the House of Commons saying that to meet Kyoto standards would require taking every car off the road and every plane out of the sky. The veracity of this statement is easy to verify.
Quebec has stated it is attempting to reach Kyoto targets. On May 29, CanWest News Service’s Mike De Souza reported that the province has been successful. "The Quebec industrial sector reduced their greenhouse gas emissions by 9.9 per cent between 1990 and 2003, (and) increased production. So that’s one-and-a-half times Kyoto…." This, of course, is political. Harper needs votes in Quebec and Ontario to win a majority in the next election. He must therefore please these ridings, but adhere to his ideological values of highly centralized government and highly decentralized big business. The successful limiting of media access to his government has helped ensure the Kyoto story stays political. And as recent polls indicate, the strategy is working.
Thanks to the manufactured climate of amnesia continuing from the Liberal Party’s time in government, the public remains unclear on what the Kyoto Protocol is. A spring poll carried out by Ipsos Reid reveals that 89 per cent of Canadians have heard of Kyoto, but 68 per cent say they are not aware of the details. A majority of those polled worry about the economic consequences of carrying out the implementations of Kyoto. (Note that "consequences" in this case means "harms.") In the booklet Pain Without Gain: Canada and the Kyoto Protocol, the Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters project that there could be a "permanent loss of 450,000 jobs in the manufacturing sector by 2010." This collective is apparently unaware that technological investment and expansion can actually increase economic growth, as non-signatories China and India are currently planning.
The Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement on climate change that has to date been ratified by 163 countries. It establishes binding targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Canada’s target is a six per cent reduction of 1990 levels by 2012. The developed world, as a percentage of its population, is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. As the original accord indicated, these highly developed and growing economies would be able to absorb the initial cost of reducing emissions. In 2012, it is expected that developing nations would sign on to the agreement. But again, these are political issues.
What is likely to occur in the current political climate is that the Conservatives will continue to stall on all socially sensitive issues, and push through a vote-winner like tax cuts. Whenever a politically controversial issue is raised, they’ll point to the Liberals’ obvious failures. And by its illustrated role, the mainstream media will keep the debates political – even the ones that aren’t.
It is an interesting political climate when a work of fiction and its political controversy is more hotly debated than a work built on irrefutable science. Conservatives have been in power for 136 days. During this period Canada’s "premier" national newspaper has mentioned The Da Vinci Code 152 times, the Kyoto agreement on climate change, 155. |
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