via “afeman”, hoisted from comments:
Here’s a view from a recovering journalist:
http://thephoenix.com/Boston/news/146647-convenient-excuse/
…This failure is repeated across the mainstream media landscape — the product of a mindset in which climate change is simply another environmental problem, albeit a particularly complex one for which we’ll eventually find a technical fix, mainly by doing more or less the same things we’re doing now, only more efficiently and with better technology. It’s nothing to get too excited about.
It’s certainly not anything to sacrifice your career over.
About a year and a half ago — having left my job as the senior producer of NPR’s On Point the year before — I took a deliberate leap of conscience and became a climate activist. …
… I’m freed of an insidious form of self-censorship, based on a deeply misguided self-image all too common among mainstream media types, in which journalists, including “serious” opinion journalists, are supposed to remain detached and above the fray — not to say cynically aloof and perpetually bemused — in order to be taken seriously. Once you’ve become an advocate, once you’ve taken an unambiguous moral stand, so the thinking goes, your intellectual honesty is compromised.
Well, I’m sorry, but that’s just bullshit. …
‘Silence equals death’. Silence? What silence?
Silence about the scale and scope of the risk, Vinny. At least on this side of the pond.
More specifically, the near-total absence of the topic from consideration in the election.