Today The New York Times introduces a new columnist, and a new idea of a columnist — a graphics columnist. And Charles Blow lives up to the billing by succinctly making an important point that his far-better-paid media peers at ABC and other television networks cannot seem to grasp. (Perhaps living in TV land makes a person think that the real world is made out of pixels.) Blow writes:
The League of Conservation Voters, an environmental watchdog group,
reports that in the debates in which five Sunday-morning television
anchors — George Stephanopoulos,Tim Russert, Wolf Blitzer, Chris Wallace, and Bob Schieffer — have participated (17
in total) and in their major interviews with the candidates (176 in
total) only eight of the 2,372 questions asked have mentioned global warming or climate change.
That omission is baffling because the environment has become a big issue for Americans. Nearly 6 in 10 people responding to a Pew Research Center poll in January said that protecting the environment and dealing with energy problems should be top priorities.
Americans
have awakened to some simple and frightening realities. The earth is
getting hotter. The world’s ice is melting. The sea level is rising,
and will continue to do so. How much? That’s the question. The answer
may largely depend on the course America takes, since we have been the
most egregious at treating the air like a sewer for carbon emissions.Apparently, the moderators didn’t get the message. Instead they revived
a more trivial issue, allowing a question that called Mr. Obama’s
patriotism into question for not wearing a flag pin on his lapel.
Better to have tied patriotism to the environment and ask whose global
warming plan will best ensure that no one will ever have to go to Lower Manhattan and point to the spot in the water where ground zero used to be.
Kit Stolz 