NBC's Green Week Just Plain Goofy

NBC’s “Green Week” dominated the airwaves for all of last week (see link at bottom of page), complete with a green-plumed NBC peacock in place of its typically rainbow-shaded counterpart and sitcom scripts centered around climate change. It also featured a special program called “Ends of the Earth” – yes, “Ends of the Earth”, in which NBC’s most celebrated reporters scattered to the far corners of the globe and relayed the flagrant evidence of climate change to network headquarters. Of course, they couldn’t name the program “far corners of the globe.” I admit, “Ends of the Earth” is more alliterative, concise, and cute. It is also more connotatively threatening, a deliberate move by NBC to scare up some viewership. The network, of course, admits to no such agenda.
One particular correspondence between NBC headquarters and Anne Curry in Antarctica was more than illustrative. She was asked if she had witnessed any evidence of “the melting,” a reference to the ubiquitous images of dripping icicles and crumbling glaciers we have seen in recent years. Curry, worried she would undermine the best intentions of Green Week with an unequivocal “no”, began to flip hurriedly through statistics that “proved” the melting was occurring, despite first-hand evidence to the contrary. She first said the statistics were from 2005, then later corrected herself. They were from 2002.
If you’re going to hedge, at least do it properly. Ducking behind irrelevant statistics might fool the everyman, but falsely citing such references and then correcting yourself later is more than a bit conspicuous. It was as if she was screaming to the masses “no there is not any melting that I can see, but I don’t want to explicate that fact because NBC paid good money to hole me up in Antarctica for a week in order to show the world that it’s melting!” Better luck next year, ladies.


I would also like to apologize publicly for the lengthy list of links at the bottom of my page. Despite numerous attempts to incorporate links into the body of my blog, I have been unsuccessful. I'm using an older Mac and the "add link" icon is nonexistent. Sorry everyone!