How long will our mainstream media play politics with our climate and our ability to live on this planet? The New York Times is sedating its readers. MSNBC is sedating its audience too. They all are. We have seen this before — the mainstream media exists to make money by entertaining us and selling advertising. That is their purpose. They do this by keeping people in a state of curiosity and interest, but don’t necessarily give us factual information. The way they do that is to placate us when things seem too scary, or scare us when things seem too placid. Confuse us when things seem clear. Distract us with dumb interviews or outrageous speculations, like the ones above. They create controversy to keep everyone interested, by presenting more than one side of a situation that doesn’t have more than one side. They do that by presenting arguments that say misleading and false things. We know what is causing climate change, for example, and it’s mainly caused by man’s activities — but that’s an inconvenient fact that the media would rather ignore. They would rather have people argue about the cause and even whether climate change exists, even after well-established science has arrived at a conclusion over 20 years ago. There is little controversy in facts, and controversy is what keeps the uneducated people tuning in. Unfortunately this approach is keeping people in the U.S. ignorant and we are falling behind other countries in every aspect of renewable energy.

Glenn Beck, Rush, FOX News commentators, columnists in large newspapers, and other nuts are supposing that President Obama planned the oil rig explosion in order to destroy the coal industry, or maybe the oil industry. It’s complete nonsense to imagine that someone caused this oil rig explosion on purpose. Oil rig workers have been talking about the cause of this explosion but few people are listening, but it’s so much more fun to think this was done on purpose. You can hear an oil rig explosion survivor on the most recent Climate Files podcast describe exactly what happened. Of course it wasn’t done on purpose. See “Heckofajob Brownie” on Chris Matthews’ show yesterday (above), for the most paranoid in the latest right-wing nutso theories.

The media in the U.S. does not seem to care that we know how bad the oil leak in the Gulf is. They talk about fixing it, as if that is even possible. They don’t talk about how damaging to the environment this is. They would rather we blame it all on politics, and ponder that this might have been something Democrats or Obama did. It’s absolutely ridiculous how our media is treating this oil leak. There is no excuse for deliberately interviewing idiots like the man above on a national cable news show. (If I see the know-nothing Sarah Palin [...]