24-7… AGHH!

24-hour news sources have had a horrible impact on actual news reporting, I think.  This is backed up by two former journalists in their book, Warp Speed: America in the Age of Mixed Media.

“24-hour news creates wild competition among media organizations for audience sharing. This, coupled with the profit demand from their corporate ownership, has led to a decline in journalistic standards.”

 Besides profits and the need to fill air space…everything has become political, divisive, and "BREAKING NEWS!!!!!*."  I've quit paying much attention to it all and I know many others who have, too.  It's exhausting.

 The problem comes when there truly IS news that we need to pay attention to:

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) has been weakening – and new predictions suggest it could totally switch off between 2025 and 2095.

NASA Visualization Imagery - Gulf Stream flow patterns

 There are certainly differing opinions in the scientific community about this; but this particular study shows the weakening of parts of the AMOC that is going on right now.  

 What is the AMOC? 

The AMOC is a system of ocean currents that circulates water within the Atlantic Ocean, bringing warm water north and cold water south.

 In other words, it is the movement of the currents in the Atlantic Ocean that allows for warm water from the tropics to raise temperatures in the north keeping a new ice age from forming while allowing cooler waters to move south for adequate rainfall and cooler temperatures in the southern hemisphere like in Africa, which is slowly becoming a desert.

 This is a crisis.  THIS is Breaking News.  

 But who cares?  We are worn down, overwhelmed with things that are of lesser importance, unaware of what's truly important or not, and equally unaware of what's actually true or not.

 News has always been biased…but we have gone to extremes in the last 40 years or so.  We hide war horror after showing the realities of the Vietnam War on television.  Journalists for major news outlets report Twitter feeds instead of going into the actual nations or communities to report reality.  

Let me be clear…"liberal" and "conservative" news media outlets both mostly do this.  We hear opinions more than facts.  Sometimes what sells is the idea that we're dumb and need some pundit to tell us what to think.

 I'm not dumb…tired, yes.  Disappointed, yes.  Frustrated, yes.  But I do know enough that the AMOC is scary and the world leaders and economic forces need to make this their top priority and I know enough that they won't until the people demand it…no pundit needs to tell me that.

-Kathleen

 *Jon Stewart on the Daily Show used to reference CNN as the source of all "AGHHH!"

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