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GreenWatch Is- A Personal Note By Jay Burney
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Understanding the Media 101
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and GreenWatch Friend Dr. Wangari Muta Maathai (1940-2011) on a visit to Buffalo NY in 2006. Photo by Jay Burney
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Information is power! During the decade leading up to the Gulf Oil disaster, journalism, reporting, and how and where people get their information has undergone transformations that are unparalleled in human history. This media revolution has transformed humanity. Access to information, and the ability to create and distribute information has become easier, immediate, and fecund. This high yield information highway has brought both benefit and drawback. The benefit being more access by more people to more information. The disadvantage being that much of that information is false, misleading, and disingenuous. To some it may appear to be intellectually nutritious, but for many the info glut is in fact more filling than nourishing. Like global food production strategies, much of our information diet is fundamentally based on quantity rather than quality.
GreenWatch was created in direct response to the Gulf Oil disaster, the lack of informed and critical coverage and analysis by both legacy media and others, and the need to provide a resource for media makers and media consumers regarding context, critical analysis, mentoring, and learning. Media literacy is a fundamental and increasingly marginalized skill in our consumer/1% driven society. Media culture is more often about building audiences and social engineering than it is about creating information that promotes informed decision making. In addition, as media operations become downsized and more cost efficient, experienced reporters and critical analysis across all platforms of media have been marginalized or let go in favor of lower paid and less capable individuals that are often clueless relative to what they are asked to report on. GreenWatch is designed to both bring attention to that marginalization, and to provide resources to improve our consumer and producer literacy.
Often info that we are exposed to in our main stream media is little more than politically financed propaganda. Politics is every where, -science, education, health care, and it is all driven by one of the most political and powerful forces ever to visit humanity-economic development and growth. I won’t charge into a critique of global economic policies here but lets suffice it to say that when the motivation, and often the only motivation, is growth and profit -the door to building a more sustainable, informed, and fundamentally peaceful society is slammed shut, locked, and the keys are swallowed by the hidden hands that control the destiny’s of the 99% of us. This does not lead to a sustainable future that works for most of us.
The kind of subterfuge and disinformation that we are deliberately saturated in has led not to a more “enlightened society” but rather to a more illiterate, confused, and conflicted world view. Borne on the wings of media campaigns, this saturation has brought a decade of wars, an exponentially widening gap between rich and poor, and environmental and social depredations that are unprecedented in scale.
Occupy the Media
Contemporary political scenarios played out in the media often pit one group of jingoistic screamers against another side of belching hooters and hollerers. That often sounds like bees buzzing in a jar and does not lead to thoughtful exchanges based on critical thinking. Our global and national dialogue is marginalized by soundbites and prejudicial images and reporters that want to stir conflict and controversy to improve ratings or deliver a non objective message. That message is often based on fear. Our human instinct to fight or flight motivates our personal actions. Sometimes it just makes me want to go out and shop for something.
This may be changing with the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, but as we move into the final phases of the U.S. Presidential election cycle, we must be ever vigilant for the lies and disinformation that mainstream media is built on. "Occupy the Media" might be a rallying call for a movement to unlock the overwhelming challenges to critical thinking and informed decision making.
Media and Democracy
The result of media infiltration by skilled craftspeople with an agenda to make money is not only complete social gridlock, but also loss of social well-being. Politicians that free market fundamentalism and or avow that they are messengers from god are marching us into a worldview that discounts even the most menial education in favor of creating a grateful workforce that will do the bidding of the unseen hand of the free market. Pundits that profess to speak for the vast majority want us to believe that if we dismember education and eliminate our safety nets involving health care and eldercare, we will become stronger. Someone will become stronger, but to borrow the current idiom, it wont be the 99%.
Large and often hidden corporate interests are trying to convince us that we need to keep government out of the business of oversight and examination of the private sector. Politicians and pundits accept trillion dollar bailouts as corporate welfare and argue for the elimination of the US Department of Education and the oversight functions of the EPA.
And yet there is still a shrill insistence that so-called moral watchdogs have a fundamental place in our bedrooms and doctor's offices. This is especially true if you are a female, but have no doubt, it strikes at the fundamental rights of all people.
The clear message is that accountability doesn’t matter in what masquerades as a democracy -except for the accountability apparently "entitled" to the hidden hand of the fundamentalist free market authority.
Media has a great responsibility here. A simple overview of the role of media goes that the more info available the more likely individuals are to make informed decisions on the issues of the day. The problem is that we are having our critical decision-making genes bred out of us. How can we distinguish the real from the disingenuous? Here is the rub. Media is big business.
The economics of media has changed tremendously in the last decade as technology expands our economic growth. It has been true since at least the days of Marshal McCluhan that he central mantra of media success remains that most media is not about providing informed content, but rather it is about creating audiences for products. This may seem like a simplistic equation but if you do not understand it you are missing how the economic marketplace that technology and media has evolved into.
Talented and highly trained people craft messages and images that influence how and what you think, and more importantly what you buy. In general media does not foster critical thinking. Media is a tool to get you to buy product. In our disposable consumer society based on things such as planned obsolescence, quick unregulated supreme profit and unending and unregulated growth, the message is not about environmental sanity, not about cultural dignity, respect or global well being. It is not about real sustainability as in sustaining life on the planet. It is about sustaining a system of exploitation and wealth building for the chosen few. It is about the quickest route to the most profit. Period. Signed sealed and delivered on your personal devices and media of choice.
In the decade leading up to the Gulf Oil disaster and continuing onto today, big mainstream media faced an economic maelstrom presented by the new technology of the cable and internets tubes and the ability to deliver content on personal devices. For decades leading up to this challenge television transformed how media was delivered because our attention spans were modified. Learning once involved a lifetime of thinking, sorting things out, discussing and evolving. By the time Sesame Street began massaging children’s learning ecosystems the craftsmen knew very well that you had to teach lessons in short bursts, often in under 15 seconds. This fast paced TV show became the neural backbone of generations of Americans and we exported this around the globe. Most adults today have a hard time paying attention to anything for longer than a few seconds. Of course we have medicine for that, medicine that dulls the sharp-edged neural transmitters that may have evolved due to how we have learned to think.
Which brings us back to the mainstream media. One of the rudimentary ways that big media reacted to the new technology and the accompanying economic meme, was to go lighter, quicker, cheaper. Enter the dragon. The only strategies becomes increase profits or lose your job.
This meant the elimination of in depth reporting, analysis, and investigation. Critical approaches to stories go out the door along with the “expensive” and seasoned reporters that had the knowledge to put context into a story. Instead fluff was packaged and meaningless drivel arrived in the form of mostly angry white men posing as pundits. Media managers learned quickly the lesson that analysis doesn’t matter as much as the entertainment provided by screaming slapstick based on promoting metaphorical slipping on banana peals.
With my apologies to Fred Kent and Mark Goldman, lighter, quicker and cheaper has a lot of context outside of waterfront development. And it is not always as good as what I think they have brought to Buffalo. In the media world, this approach has fundamentally transformed how we think, how we learn, and how we act.
In the decade leading up to the Gulf Oil disaster our national political and economic gestalt was media characterized by 9/11, terrorism, unending war, and a political campaign of fear that resulted in, at least, the barely scrutinized and uncritical passage of the Patriot Acts.
This fear entered our national and personal consciousness and deeply affected our primordial brain functions. Scientists know that we make quick and lasting decisions based on first impressions and that the functions of our brain that registers these first impressions are difficult to alter or dislodge. The media dragon exploits this exquisitely.
American politics which had become heavily invested in fundamentalist free market theory took advantage of these fears. A great and expensive campaign arose to acquire the hearts and minds of the American public. This campaign posited less regulation, less scrutiny and less accountability. The secret government rose in our midst. (See Richard Cheney-Energy Task Force, Halliburton, Blackwater, just for a start!)
In the decade leading to the Gulf Oil disaster, the American way of life was transformed by fear. The social zeitgeist moved away from critical thinking. The big business mainstream media was complicit and it trickled down to almost all levels of information. Lets not rock the boat by informing people, we need to sell or die. That is the way we roll. Never mind that growth without limit, exploitation without scrutiny, and managing human life on the fragile blue planet without paying attention to science is a mismatch with mother nature that we will all too soon learn the consequences of.
Lighter cheaper, quicker is a great way to sell product. Think Walmart. In a culture of fear and confusion, the marketing propaganda that supports the freemaket fundamentalists and unregulated growth took the beachhead and marched through our world with a scorched earth policy that would put William Tecumseh Sherman to shame. We lost the vision of accountability and our media infrastructure has both led and followed.
Big mainstream media messages have become farcical, simplified, and grossly inadequate. They are one dimensional and designed to build audiences for products. This propaganda seems to have worked. Despite the fact that cities are burning and governments are falling, and despite the fact that we are all encouraged to speak against dissent and speak with one voice, the global economy seems to be thriving. Have you noticed? It just isn’t trickling down to most of us. The wealthy have become much more so, even as the poor have become more poor.
In the media, climate change becomes a joke. Natural resources are not about ecological integrity, but instead about resources to be exploited and commodified, to support the allegory and pretense of economic growth.
We need more energy to support growth goes the sloganeering. This is about wealth extracted from limited fossil fuels and the expansion of nuclear strategies. Damned the torpedo’s, full speed ahead. Despite the energy independence jingoism, Americans do not control the transnational corporations in the oil and gas business. “Drill baby drill” is a common anti–environmental and arguably anti-American catch phrase which promotes unregulated and unscrutinized growth. When for instance was the last time you heard a discussion about limits to growth? Don’t you think that in this world of exponentially expanding human populations, and the resultant destruction of the world’s ecosystems that we ought to have a national discussion about this?
The media messages follow the drumbeats of the free market fundamentalists that control our political economic strategies. Authentic and knowledgeable journalists and other media makers that know how to build a story outside of sponsored talking points became marginalized and have all but disappeared. This is true at the NY Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CNN and even locally at the Buffalo News as some of our most seasoned and knowledgeable reporters are being bought out in an effort to create a lighter quicker and CHEAPER product to sell and for us to read. Not to knock the Buffalo News. They are following industry standards. It is what it is. But how does this downsizing and dumbing down content deliver us to a future that works?
When the gulf oil disaster occurred, it shocked and surprised many of us. My frenetic response was to ask how on earth did they get the permits to build this Rube Goldberg drill contraption? A little investigation revealed that there are thousands of others similar contraptions in the Gulf including at least 3,500 capped and eroding wells that are basically unobserved and largely forgotten. Are they going to lead to an ecological Armageddon that will dwarf the economic and social consequences to future generations of for instance Medicare for all, or closing corporate tax loopholes? Why are we not pursuing this discussion?
The answer for me over a year ago was because we do not have a generation of media makers or of media opportunities to do the kind of legitimate, articulate, and critical journalism and media making that it requires to have an informed and critically thinking generation of decision makers. Knowledge is power. And so we began the GreenWatch project to help media makers find context, critical thinking, and peer reviews and conversations about the subjects of environment and sustainability. GreenWatch’s partnership with Artvoice is a step toward creating and managing a marketplace for writers and other media makers. We have been working with media makers including writers, bloggers, artists, film and video makers, and photographers and we now launch into an episode of finding a way to support these media makers in the marketplace. We are seeking new collaborations and partnerships. If you are a media maker and want to work with us to improve your and our products, please contact us.
You can find us on Facebook by CLICKING HERE
Information is power! During the decade leading up to the Gulf Oil disaster, journalism, reporting, and how and where people get their information has undergone transformations that are unparalleled in human history. This media revolution has transformed humanity. Access to information, and the ability to create and distribute information has become easier, immediate, and fecund. This high yield information highway has brought both benefit and drawback. The benefit being more access by more people to more information. The disadvantage being that much of that information is false, misleading, and disingenuous. To some it may appear to be intellectually nutritious, but for many the info glut is in fact more filling than nourishing. Like global food production strategies, much of our information diet is fundamentally based on quantity rather than quality.
GreenWatch was created in direct response to the Gulf Oil disaster, the lack of informed and critical coverage and analysis by both legacy media and others, and the need to provide a resource for media makers and media consumers regarding context, critical analysis, mentoring, and learning. Media literacy is a fundamental and increasingly marginalized skill in our consumer/1% driven society. Media culture is more often about building audiences and social engineering than it is about creating information that promotes informed decision making. In addition, as media operations become downsized and more cost efficient, experienced reporters and critical analysis across all platforms of media have been marginalized or let go in favor of lower paid and less capable individuals that are often clueless relative to what they are asked to report on. GreenWatch is designed to both bring attention to that marginalization, and to provide resources to improve our consumer and producer literacy.
Often info that we are exposed to in our main stream media is little more than politically financed propaganda. Politics is every where, -science, education, health care, and it is all driven by one of the most political and powerful forces ever to visit humanity-economic development and growth. I won’t charge into a critique of global economic policies here but lets suffice it to say that when the motivation, and often the only motivation, is growth and profit -the door to building a more sustainable, informed, and fundamentally peaceful society is slammed shut, locked, and the keys are swallowed by the hidden hands that control the destiny’s of the 99% of us. This does not lead to a sustainable future that works for most of us.
The kind of subterfuge and disinformation that we are deliberately saturated in has led not to a more “enlightened society” but rather to a more illiterate, confused, and conflicted world view. Borne on the wings of media campaigns, this saturation has brought a decade of wars, an exponentially widening gap between rich and poor, and environmental and social depredations that are unprecedented in scale.
Occupy the Media
Contemporary political scenarios played out in the media often pit one group of jingoistic screamers against another side of belching hooters and hollerers. That often sounds like bees buzzing in a jar and does not lead to thoughtful exchanges based on critical thinking. Our global and national dialogue is marginalized by soundbites and prejudicial images and reporters that want to stir conflict and controversy to improve ratings or deliver a non objective message. That message is often based on fear. Our human instinct to fight or flight motivates our personal actions. Sometimes it just makes me want to go out and shop for something.
This may be changing with the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, but as we move into the final phases of the U.S. Presidential election cycle, we must be ever vigilant for the lies and disinformation that mainstream media is built on. "Occupy the Media" might be a rallying call for a movement to unlock the overwhelming challenges to critical thinking and informed decision making.
Media and Democracy
The result of media infiltration by skilled craftspeople with an agenda to make money is not only complete social gridlock, but also loss of social well-being. Politicians that free market fundamentalism and or avow that they are messengers from god are marching us into a worldview that discounts even the most menial education in favor of creating a grateful workforce that will do the bidding of the unseen hand of the free market. Pundits that profess to speak for the vast majority want us to believe that if we dismember education and eliminate our safety nets involving health care and eldercare, we will become stronger. Someone will become stronger, but to borrow the current idiom, it wont be the 99%.
Large and often hidden corporate interests are trying to convince us that we need to keep government out of the business of oversight and examination of the private sector. Politicians and pundits accept trillion dollar bailouts as corporate welfare and argue for the elimination of the US Department of Education and the oversight functions of the EPA.
And yet there is still a shrill insistence that so-called moral watchdogs have a fundamental place in our bedrooms and doctor's offices. This is especially true if you are a female, but have no doubt, it strikes at the fundamental rights of all people.
The clear message is that accountability doesn’t matter in what masquerades as a democracy -except for the accountability apparently "entitled" to the hidden hand of the fundamentalist free market authority.
Media has a great responsibility here. A simple overview of the role of media goes that the more info available the more likely individuals are to make informed decisions on the issues of the day. The problem is that we are having our critical decision-making genes bred out of us. How can we distinguish the real from the disingenuous? Here is the rub. Media is big business.
The economics of media has changed tremendously in the last decade as technology expands our economic growth. It has been true since at least the days of Marshal McCluhan that he central mantra of media success remains that most media is not about providing informed content, but rather it is about creating audiences for products. This may seem like a simplistic equation but if you do not understand it you are missing how the economic marketplace that technology and media has evolved into.
Talented and highly trained people craft messages and images that influence how and what you think, and more importantly what you buy. In general media does not foster critical thinking. Media is a tool to get you to buy product. In our disposable consumer society based on things such as planned obsolescence, quick unregulated supreme profit and unending and unregulated growth, the message is not about environmental sanity, not about cultural dignity, respect or global well being. It is not about real sustainability as in sustaining life on the planet. It is about sustaining a system of exploitation and wealth building for the chosen few. It is about the quickest route to the most profit. Period. Signed sealed and delivered on your personal devices and media of choice.
In the decade leading up to the Gulf Oil disaster and continuing onto today, big mainstream media faced an economic maelstrom presented by the new technology of the cable and internets tubes and the ability to deliver content on personal devices. For decades leading up to this challenge television transformed how media was delivered because our attention spans were modified. Learning once involved a lifetime of thinking, sorting things out, discussing and evolving. By the time Sesame Street began massaging children’s learning ecosystems the craftsmen knew very well that you had to teach lessons in short bursts, often in under 15 seconds. This fast paced TV show became the neural backbone of generations of Americans and we exported this around the globe. Most adults today have a hard time paying attention to anything for longer than a few seconds. Of course we have medicine for that, medicine that dulls the sharp-edged neural transmitters that may have evolved due to how we have learned to think.
Which brings us back to the mainstream media. One of the rudimentary ways that big media reacted to the new technology and the accompanying economic meme, was to go lighter, quicker, cheaper. Enter the dragon. The only strategies becomes increase profits or lose your job.
This meant the elimination of in depth reporting, analysis, and investigation. Critical approaches to stories go out the door along with the “expensive” and seasoned reporters that had the knowledge to put context into a story. Instead fluff was packaged and meaningless drivel arrived in the form of mostly angry white men posing as pundits. Media managers learned quickly the lesson that analysis doesn’t matter as much as the entertainment provided by screaming slapstick based on promoting metaphorical slipping on banana peals.
With my apologies to Fred Kent and Mark Goldman, lighter, quicker and cheaper has a lot of context outside of waterfront development. And it is not always as good as what I think they have brought to Buffalo. In the media world, this approach has fundamentally transformed how we think, how we learn, and how we act.
In the decade leading up to the Gulf Oil disaster our national political and economic gestalt was media characterized by 9/11, terrorism, unending war, and a political campaign of fear that resulted in, at least, the barely scrutinized and uncritical passage of the Patriot Acts.
This fear entered our national and personal consciousness and deeply affected our primordial brain functions. Scientists know that we make quick and lasting decisions based on first impressions and that the functions of our brain that registers these first impressions are difficult to alter or dislodge. The media dragon exploits this exquisitely.
American politics which had become heavily invested in fundamentalist free market theory took advantage of these fears. A great and expensive campaign arose to acquire the hearts and minds of the American public. This campaign posited less regulation, less scrutiny and less accountability. The secret government rose in our midst. (See Richard Cheney-Energy Task Force, Halliburton, Blackwater, just for a start!)
In the decade leading to the Gulf Oil disaster, the American way of life was transformed by fear. The social zeitgeist moved away from critical thinking. The big business mainstream media was complicit and it trickled down to almost all levels of information. Lets not rock the boat by informing people, we need to sell or die. That is the way we roll. Never mind that growth without limit, exploitation without scrutiny, and managing human life on the fragile blue planet without paying attention to science is a mismatch with mother nature that we will all too soon learn the consequences of.
Lighter cheaper, quicker is a great way to sell product. Think Walmart. In a culture of fear and confusion, the marketing propaganda that supports the freemaket fundamentalists and unregulated growth took the beachhead and marched through our world with a scorched earth policy that would put William Tecumseh Sherman to shame. We lost the vision of accountability and our media infrastructure has both led and followed.
Big mainstream media messages have become farcical, simplified, and grossly inadequate. They are one dimensional and designed to build audiences for products. This propaganda seems to have worked. Despite the fact that cities are burning and governments are falling, and despite the fact that we are all encouraged to speak against dissent and speak with one voice, the global economy seems to be thriving. Have you noticed? It just isn’t trickling down to most of us. The wealthy have become much more so, even as the poor have become more poor.
In the media, climate change becomes a joke. Natural resources are not about ecological integrity, but instead about resources to be exploited and commodified, to support the allegory and pretense of economic growth.
We need more energy to support growth goes the sloganeering. This is about wealth extracted from limited fossil fuels and the expansion of nuclear strategies. Damned the torpedo’s, full speed ahead. Despite the energy independence jingoism, Americans do not control the transnational corporations in the oil and gas business. “Drill baby drill” is a common anti–environmental and arguably anti-American catch phrase which promotes unregulated and unscrutinized growth. When for instance was the last time you heard a discussion about limits to growth? Don’t you think that in this world of exponentially expanding human populations, and the resultant destruction of the world’s ecosystems that we ought to have a national discussion about this?
The media messages follow the drumbeats of the free market fundamentalists that control our political economic strategies. Authentic and knowledgeable journalists and other media makers that know how to build a story outside of sponsored talking points became marginalized and have all but disappeared. This is true at the NY Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CNN and even locally at the Buffalo News as some of our most seasoned and knowledgeable reporters are being bought out in an effort to create a lighter quicker and CHEAPER product to sell and for us to read. Not to knock the Buffalo News. They are following industry standards. It is what it is. But how does this downsizing and dumbing down content deliver us to a future that works?
When the gulf oil disaster occurred, it shocked and surprised many of us. My frenetic response was to ask how on earth did they get the permits to build this Rube Goldberg drill contraption? A little investigation revealed that there are thousands of others similar contraptions in the Gulf including at least 3,500 capped and eroding wells that are basically unobserved and largely forgotten. Are they going to lead to an ecological Armageddon that will dwarf the economic and social consequences to future generations of for instance Medicare for all, or closing corporate tax loopholes? Why are we not pursuing this discussion?
The answer for me over a year ago was because we do not have a generation of media makers or of media opportunities to do the kind of legitimate, articulate, and critical journalism and media making that it requires to have an informed and critically thinking generation of decision makers. Knowledge is power. And so we began the GreenWatch project to help media makers find context, critical thinking, and peer reviews and conversations about the subjects of environment and sustainability. GreenWatch’s partnership with Artvoice is a step toward creating and managing a marketplace for writers and other media makers. We have been working with media makers including writers, bloggers, artists, film and video makers, and photographers and we now launch into an episode of finding a way to support these media makers in the marketplace. We are seeking new collaborations and partnerships. If you are a media maker and want to work with us to improve your and our products, please contact us.
You can find us on Facebook by CLICKING HERE