Thursday, April 20, 2006

mixed messages

The Independent keeps on doing prominent stories about climate change, seeing the issue clearly, yet intersperses it with twaddle about how it's OK to fly as long as you pay someone to plant trees.

What could be the reason for such wilfully unjoined thinking?

Last Saturday's issue featured a huge front page splash about a 3 degree temperature rise - highly likely within decades - causing ecosystems to collapse, rainforest to retreat, drought to spread and much more.

Immediately above it, a sponsored competition from American Airlines to win flights to New York.



More than 5% of the issue was car adverts.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Medialens talk about this a lot. It seems to boil down to most of their advertising coming from car manufacturers, ergo no car adverts == no paper. Unfortunately no pro-car articles also == no car adverts == no paper.

I don't buy the Indy regularly, but I'd give them a couple of quid an issue if they really came out against cheap air travel and profligate car use. Unfortunately I think most of their target audience would just buy the Guardian instead.

(If they published in downloadable PDF like the New Statesman does I'd subscribe to their online thing. I *wish* more publications would do this.)