As I wrote in part one of this story, every time some new environmental or climate change moral panic suddenly sweeps the legacy media and its whip-cracker, social media, it pays to immediately check to see which summit is scheduled to begin soon, or which left-wing politician is trying to distract attention. Part one covered the basic facts, which show that the ‘Amazon burning’ scare is just so much bullshit.
In part two, let’s look at how the whole lying, ignorant hysteria over the supposedly burning-to-the-ground Amazon is all about politics.
Firstly, there is the G7 summit: I’m sure you’ll be shocked, shocked, to learn that the “Amazon is burning” frenzy was triggered by the politically-troubled French leader, Emmanuel Macron. As it so happens, Macron is right in the midst of trade negotiations with Brazil’s Jair Bolsanaro. Bolsanaro is, of course, an evil right-winger, the “South American Trump”. The left really, really don’t like Bolsanaro: he was stabbed almost to death, even before he was elected.
The smoke should be clearing already.
[Bolsanaro’s] Funding cuts have created plenty of enemies.
Many people have a reason to want Bolsonaro to look bad: In May Bolsonaro withdrew an offer to host a United Nations Latin America and Caribbean climate week. In the same week, the president fired self-confessed “militant environmentalist” Alfredo Sirkis, then-leader of The Brazil Forum for Climate Change. He also declared a 30 percent funding cut to maintenance costs of Brazil’s state-owned universities. Three weeks ago, Brazil’s INPE Space director was sacked. The INPE have been the source of the dire data used in some media stories. But Bolsonaro said the data was “not consistent with reality”, accused the head of the INPE of “lies” and working for an NGO.
On the 13th August Germany announced plans to withdraw some €35 million due to the country’s lack of commitment to curbing deforestation . On August 15, Norway suspended donations too […] Spot the coincidence.
The twitter firestorm is amplified just when the UN and big-government fans could use a negotiation weapon […] International leaders are transparently exploiting the hype:
“France and Ireland say they will not ratify a huge trade deal with South American nations unless Brazil does more to fight fires in the Amazon. French leader Emmanuel Macron said President Jair Bolsonaro had lied to him about his stance on climate change.” [BBC News]
The lyin’ legacy media are about as honest and truthful as the politicians.
Some journalists appear to be running off the twitter feed. But others seem to be carefully crafting their stories to highlight irrelevant, cherry-picked half truths.
joannenova.com.au/2019/08/firestorm-of-fake-news-convenient-global-hysteria-about-amazon-based-on-nothing-but-twitter-pics/
The legacy media aren’t even trying to hide their bias. In fact, the Columbia Journalism Review, “intellectual leader…the most respected voice on press criticism, [which] shapes the ideas that make media leaders and journalists smarter about their work”, is openly touting the legacy media narrative.
CJR is emailing journalists around the world, ordering them to fall in line.
Our ask of you is simple: commit to a week of focused climate coverage this September. We are organizing news outlets across the US and abroad—online and print, TV and audio, large and small—to run seven days of climate stories from September 16 through the climate summit UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres hosts in New York September 23.
mailchi.mp/cjr/announcing-new-covering-climate-now-project
Could they be any more obvious?
In his bestselling State of Fear, Michael Crichton writes that “Politicians need fear to control the population […] the media need scare stories to capture an audience […] this is the way modern society works – by the constant creation of fear”.
In Crichton’s novel, a shadowy cabal of e-NGOs and environmental terrorists conspire to engineer a series of devastating ‘natural’ disasters in order to grab attention for their climate scare campaign. But, with the “Amazon is burning” bonfire of bullshit, the left-media elite aren’t even bothering to hide what they’re up to any more.
https://thebfd.co.nz/2019/08/the-amazon-is-burning-pt-1-a-flaming-heap-of-bullshit/
