Extracts from an article at Medialens:
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/06/060131_welcome_to_mars.php
The Independent is feeling the heat from public criticism of its adverts pushing foreign travel, cars and endless consumerism. A recent editorial noted:
“Just ponder this as you flick through those holiday brochures and even the travel pages of this newspaper to brighten up the grey January days... Fuelled by cheap flights, the British wanderlust seems far from sated. Fuelled is the operative word here. For the cost of cheap flights may be low in pounds sterling but the cost to the environment is high.” (‘All these flights abroad could end up costing us the earth’, leader, The Independent, January 28, 2006)
It is rare indeed for a paper to even hint at the negative impacts of the advertising it carries.
Over at the Independent on Sunday (IoS), deputy editor Michael Williams dismissed readers protesting the paper's climate-killing adverts as “a curmudgeonly lot of puritans, miseries, killjoys, Stalinists and glooms.” (Williams, ‘A bottle of bubbly for the best way to fly’, Independent on Sunday, January 22, 2006)...
Where are the news reports on how economic ‘growth’ is destroying the planet and impoverishing billions?
Where are the BBC Ten O’Clock News headlines declaring ‘Big business is once again blocking action on climate change’, and ‘Industry is spending billions on PR campaigns to fuel dangerous consumption’?
When did ITN news bulletins last declare ‘The government is succumbing to intense lobbying from the nuclear industry’, or ‘Global capitalism is destroying the planet’s life-support systems’?
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