Sunday, July 08, 2007

Shoveling Up the Same B.S.

If you're a rock musician willing to sell your music to advertise stuff for sale then you are all right in NPR News World, but if you bring your music to to a cause such as stopping global warming then you're a target for ridicule. David Greene did his best to make the attendees and performers at yesterday's Live Earth event seem like a bunch of fools at best (quoting Dave Matthews on using cloth diapers) or hypocrites at worst:
"It was all to be very grand and high-minded but yesterday afternoon outside giant stadium it was all about tailgating and beer pong....beer pong involves trying to toss ping pong balls into cups of beer...Kara Mueller [sp.] was hosting one of the games outside an SUV...
You get the drift. NPR ends this little put down with a 50 second clip of the Police singing the refrain "Sending out an SOS" over and over and over...(and so the title of this post).

Compare other coverage (The Madison Capital Times or The Guardian of London) of the event and notice that they too question the effectiveness of such events--but with a lot less sneer. Readers who haven't seen it should also take a look at Chris Mooney's two part piece on global warming and media coverage of it - Part I and Part II which are posted at the Huffington Post.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Little Scottie Simon did his best to diss Al Gore ("Why hold concerts across the world when you're reaching millions of people right now?"), but Al was unflappable. At the end of the interview, I detected a bit of snark in his voice when he said, "Thanks...Scott" in a off-hand sort of way.