Robert Jensen, Media in an Age of Calamity, Wars in the Middle East, and the media "debate" about the BP oil spill

Talk Nation Radio, for the week of June 16, 2010
Robert Jensen, Media in Age of Calamity, BP Spill update
We look at media coverage of the BP oil spill, of the drilling regulation "debate" and U.S. policy in the Middle east.



Produced by Dori Smith, Storrs, CT
TRT: 29:12
Download at Pacifica's Audioport here or at Radio4all.net and Archive.org

US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to break records for cost in dollars and lives and time served by US and other forces. In the meantime, the American people seem to be more at risk than ever of losing all hope of home ownership, or even financial security.

We look at media coverage of these leading cataclysmic stories, How can we improve the media and be more actively engaged in helping?

Journalist Robert Jensen is at the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He has a Ph.D. in media ethics and law from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. He worked as a journalist for a decade prior to joining academia, and presently teaches courses in media law, ethics, and politics.

Next week, we'll hear more on the BP spill from scientist Craig McClain, Assistant Director of Science for the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center. He focuses on the ecological and evolutionary drivers of marine invertebrate biodiversity:

Craig McClain: "Because of a variety of things, ocean warming, ocean acidification, the sort of things that have been gong on for a while now, the depletion of the reef and the fish throughout the Gulf of Mexico, the degradation of the marshes and wetlands along the Gulf Coast especially around Louisiana; those things were already occurring before the oil spill. And now we've asked all of those other systems to take another impact which is the oil spill and so the question is, now have we pushed all of these systems past their tipping points? Have we created irreversible damage?"