At Red State, Steve Maley writes, “Happy Earth Day 2012, everyone! One day we may look back on this as the time when the tide began to recede – that being the tide of Anthropogenic Global Warming hysteria:”
The canary in this metaphorical mine is the Discovery Channel, long a mass purveyor of AGW porn. In its new seven-part series “Frozen Planet” Discovery confronts distraught polar bears and calving glaciers in glorious High Definition, but nary a mention of the Scientific Consensus that can best be summed up as “Aaaaargghhh! We’re All Going to Die!!”
Because their marketers have discovered that people don’t buy that. Either they don’t agree or they’ve tired of the subject, but Discovery just can’t sell that brand of compost any more.
The article in The New York Times tiptoes around that fact, blaming the lack of AGW hysteria on the “politicization” of the issue and the 10% (sic) of us Flat Earthers who are conflicted between Scientific Consensus and Our Lying Eyes.
1970s-style environmental activism made for a nice diversion during the naughts for the MSM while the economy was running on all cylinders, both to hector President Bush and his perceived ties to “Big Oil,” and to provide an alternative “moral equivalent of war” to the GWOT. But with Al Gore flailing with his low-rated public access cable TV network, and Obama having bet the ranch (with our money) and failed badly with his green-themed Gore-meets-Cook County crony socialism, it’s looking awfully tainted right now. GE-NBC wants you to turn off your lights; you’re wondering how you’ll pay the electricity bill and fill the car with gas thanks to Obama’s radical environmentalism. (It doesn’t help knowing that the MSM itself cheers for higher energy prices for its customers.)
Read the whole thing by Maley, who goes on to note that the Discovery channel is rebranding its Planet Green spinoff channel due to low ratings. Note what Wikipedia says about the channel that will replace it:
On April 4, 2012, Discovery announced through the early release of a USA Today article that the network would be rebranded as Destination America, targeted mainly towards Middle America and featuring mainly American-centric travel, food, and natural history programming that has been without a natural home since Discovery’s 2010 sale of the Travel Channel to Scripps Networks Interactive, along with other Discovery archive content that fits the Destination America branding. The network is expected to have a Memorial Day launch on May 28, 2012. The network trademark and logo was registered by Discovery Networks on February 28, 2012 through the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Depending on the execution, think that might just attract a few more viewers than Planet Green? Yeah, me too.
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