LA TIMES slams 'Meet the Press' over climate change jokes: "How Low Can News Departments Sink?"
'Meet the Press' treast climate change as just a laughing matter
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"Meet the Press" likes to swank around as though it's our premier network public affairs program. Yet somehow its producers and host think it's all right to treat a manifestly ignorant statement about climate change as "a fun moment" involving a "fun little prop" -- and to pander to American anti-intellectualism by implying that the global warming debate is just too serious and boring to waste time on, like high school kids grousing about having to go to math class. One can almost hear the producers of "Meet the Press" going, "What, climate change again? Cue up the escaping llamas."
How low can the news departments of our major networks sink? We've already reported on the decline of journalistic standards at CBS' "60 Minutes," in the context of its flawed and credulous reporting on disability and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. And now "Meet the Press," by endorsing a display of pure ignorance about an urgent issue of public policy as a "fun" prank, cedes the last shred of its credibility.
It's true that there's room for levity in reporting on politics, but this effort was spectacularly tone-deaf. Ridiculing or minimizing climate change as a topic only wonks care about -- or conniving with our least-informed political leaders to do so -- is an abandonment of every principle "Meet the Press" should stand for.
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-watch-meet-the-press-because-20150301-column.html
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