Thank God for the CBC

April 4, 2008

For the most part the way we understand what’s going on in the world comes from what we see, hear and read on major news outlets. No one has the ability to witness all the world’s events first hand and develop their own opinion on them. Our view of these events is that which is told to us, and often our perspective on these events is influenced by the manner in which they are reported.

Do you ever wonder how different news agencies decide what stories to cover, which ones to give priority to and even more important what ‘spin’ they put on the news?

A recent article on peak oil from the CBC’s web site has me thinking about this.

Peak oil has “the imperative of urgency,” according to Richard Gilbert, an urban-issues consultant based in Toronto.

“The likely outcome of not dealing with this issue is not an environmental catastrophe. It’s an economic and social catastrophe that may leave us unable to deal with the environmental catastrophe,” he said in an interview.

Later in the same article …

Well, 95 per cent of all motorized transportation is fueled by oil. Almost half of that is freight. And freight has shaped what our economies, and hence our societies, have become.

“The economies of the countries of the world in a sense float on a sea of oil,” Gilbert said. “They need that transportation to function in the way that they do now.”

Oil at $250 US a barrel would be “the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane hitting the entire North American continent at the same time,” said Perl. “There is no way for society to continue with these price increases without either an economic collapse or some kind of military crisis, or both.”

Even more chilling..

Oil-rich Western Canada would be a choice morsel to court or conquer.

The article goes on to outline the authors’ thoughts on how to best minimize the effects peak oil could potentially have on society and as a primer on the subject I’d highly encourage you to have a read.

The above quotes sound like pretty important topics to me, yet peak oil is certainly under-reported in mainstream media coverage. Here’s a little experiment you can verify for yourself. I visited several popular news web sites, CBC, BBC, PBS, CTV, CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC. CBC, BBC and PBS are publicly funded, the last four are private.

I did a search for “Peak Oil” on each of these sites. What I noticed is that to a varying degree, each of the three public sites (CBC, BBC and PBS) have published pieces on the subject. On the four private outlets, very little is available and what is available has a general ‘debunking’ theme to it.

Why such a dramatic difference between the degree to which the subject is reported and more so, how it is reported? In order to answer that, you have to think about the mandate of the different types of news sources.

Publicly funded organizations have (in theory at least) a mandate to provide information and interpretation that is in the public’s best interest. I’m sure it doesn’t always work this way, but this is the intent.

Many private news organizations are directly or indirectly owned by major multinational corporations and their mandate is to best serve their owners’ interests, not yours. Also, when you go to each of the news sites, take notice of how much advertising is on each site. Private news sites also have an obligation to their advertisers, upon whom they depend for revenue.

The differences can be summed up by saying that private news organizations have an obligation to make money. Public stations have an obligation to best inform the public.

Any chance of mitigating the effects of peak oil relies on drastically reduced public consumption of goods and energy. Reduced consumption is not in the best interest of private news organizations, their multinational owners or their corporate advertisers. So it is really any surprise that existing biases exist?

Try this little experiment out. Substitute “Peak Oil” for other topics and observer the differences. After doing this for myself, all I can say is “thank God for the CBC”.

Posted in Culture, Media, Peak Oil