{"id":1202,"date":"2007-04-08T10:20:43","date_gmt":"2007-04-08T16:20:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/?p=1202"},"modified":"2007-04-08T13:29:22","modified_gmt":"2007-04-08T19:29:22","slug":"global-warming-gets-a-bit-of-local-newspaper-coverage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/2007\/04\/08\/global-warming-gets-a-bit-of-local-newspaper-coverage\/","title":{"rendered":"Global warming gets a bit of local newspaper coverage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>How important is it that the United Nations just issued an apocalyptic report on global warning?\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Serious stories on global warming have been rare in my local paper, the <em>St. Louis Post-Dispatch<\/em>.\u00a0 I was thus happy to see that the Post-Dispatch placed a punchy graphic about global warming on the front page of yesterday\u2019s paper\u20142,500 scientists say it\u2019s going to happen and it\u2019s going to ruin the planet.\u00a0 To get the story, though, one had to turn to page 25A.\u00a0 There, one learns about<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>more than a billion people in need of water, extreme food shortages in Africa, a planetary landscape ravaged by floods and millions of species sentenced to extinction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This report was so incredibly important that the Post-Dispatch dedicated 21 column-inches of text to the story. It\u2019s about the same amount of space the PD gave to yesterday\u2019s front page story about\u00a0\u201cbratzels\u201d (bratwurst wrapped in pretzels) a new food featured at Cardinal baseball games.\u00a0 Who would have thought that \u201cbratzels\u201d were almost as important as global warming?<\/p>\n<p>That this story on global warming appeared in a local paper at all is important.\u00a0\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/?p=946\">Most people get most of their news from local TV and newspapers.<\/a>\u00a0 If global warming hadn&#8217;t appeared in the P-D, many people in my city might have assumed that it was all a hoax or that someone figured out what to do about it.<\/p>\n<p>Setting aside the graphics of the global warming story, the PD provided three thin columns of 7-inches each to describe the coming environmental disaster. That made me wonder:\u00a0 Based on the amount of space the PD gave to global warming, could it be possible that any other stories merit a comparable or greater number of newspaper coverage?\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I got out a ruler and did some simple measuring. The answer surprised me.\u00a0 Twenty-one stories merited equal or greater space than the text devoted to the U.N.\u2019s monumental report on global warming.\u00a0 Here are the headlines of those equally (or more) important stories, along with the space the P-D allocated to each of them (in column-inches).<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>University of Missouri tuition being raised &#8211; 22\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Two concrete plants stuck by vandalism. 21\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Mentor of Local opera theater dies of heart attack &#8211; 33\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Local Library branch expansion \u2013 33\u201d<\/li>\n<li>State takeover of St. Louis City Schools\u00a0 22\u201d<\/li>\n<li>St. Louis Cardinals color commentary \u2013 29\u201d<\/li>\n<li>St. Louis Cardinals beat the Astros \u2013 55\u201d<!--more--><\/li>\n<li>Creighton basketball coach doesn\u2019t move to Arkansas after all \u2013 33\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Outfielder Jim Edmonds is surprised he wasn\u2019t in the opening lineup \u2013 22\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Local television broadcast of Cardinal game had glitches.\u00a0 27\u201d<\/li>\n<li>St. Louis Blues hockey club hopes for better year next year.\u00a0 37\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Boston College hockey team does well this year.\u00a0 33\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Summaries for soap operas this week.\u00a0 37\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Michigan State will play Boston College for hockey title.\u00a0 33\u201d<\/li>\n<li>College hockey player wins award.\u00a0 44\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Local golf player misses the cut at Augusta National.\u00a0 32\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Report from the Augusta golf tournament.\u00a0 55\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Local girls soccer team loses a game.\u00a0\u00a0 33\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Report on bass fishing \u2013 22\u2019<\/li>\n<li>Local college baseball report.\u00a0 22\u201d<\/li>\n<li>\u00a0New playoff rules for local high school football teams.\u00a0 33\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Is it any wonder that most people would rather go watch a sports event (or a soap opera) than to take real action in response to this massive global threat?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Decisions to go amuse ourselves rather than to deal with an immense environmental problem could only occur in a media-driven world where there is no call to action directed to individual citizens.\u00a0 How else could you explain how people who claim to be dedicated parents would so readily steal a liveable planet from their own children.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Just\u00a0as with the case of\u00a0Iraq, the media informs us that huge problems just happen.\u00a0 Shit happens.\u00a0 There\u2019s no hint that the only way we can address this disaster (one that looms bigger than 1,000,000 New Orleans) is to make substantial individual changes in the way we produce and consume energy. There\u2019s no suggestion anywhere in that meager 21 inches of text that the problem is . . . well, go look in the mirror.\u00a0 Just maybe, buying a huge motor vehicle (the kind advertised throughout the paper) is not responsible.<\/p>\n<p>Not that we\u2019ll see any local follow-up on this global warming story, at least for a long time.\u00a0 The <em>Post-Dispatch<\/em> has already covered that.\u00a0 Now it\u2019s time to get even more serious about the baseball season . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How important is it that the United Nations just issued an apocalyptic report on global warning?\u00a0 Serious stories on global warming have been rare in my local paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.\u00a0 I was thus happy to see that the Post-Dispatch placed a punchy graphic about global warming on the front page of yesterday\u2019s paper\u20142,500 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}