{"id":63916,"date":"2015-09-21T12:00:27","date_gmt":"2015-09-21T11:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=63916"},"modified":"2015-09-18T16:11:33","modified_gmt":"2015-09-18T15:11:33","slug":"murdoch-purchases-nat-geo-for-infotainment-synergy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/09\/murdoch-purchases-nat-geo-for-infotainment-synergy\/","title":{"rendered":"Murdoch Purchases Nat Geo for Infotainment Synergy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic will lumber on; this deal is all about the boob tube.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"From<\/a>

From the National Geographic TV show “Live Free or Die”Ryan Wakeman \/ National Geographic Television<\/p><\/div>\n

Rupert Murdoch\u2019s high-profile purchase of National Geographic \u2014 perhaps the most esteemed remaining icon of middlebrow American print culture \u2014 has touched off alarms<\/a> over how the swashbuckling Australian press lord may visit a Fox News makeover on the science monthly. Murdoch, like many a right-wing mogul, is a climate change skeptic, and his flagship cable news company has famously issued editorial directives to downplay the well-established fact of human activity driving up global temperatures. Fox\u2019s on-air talent was explicitly instructed<\/a> by Washington managing editor Bill Gammon to safeguard against the blurting of the inconvenient truth about global warming during newscasts without first \u201cimmediately pointing out that such theories are based on data that critics have called into question.\u201d<\/p>\n

Murdoch\u2019s acquisition of a 73 percent share of National Geographic \u2014 for a cool $725 million \u2014 is especially troubling to the cause of climate science, since the National Geographic Society (founded as a nonprofit foundation for exploration and research) administers a $1 billion grant program to research scientists. It may well be that the scientifically discredited cause of climate denialism is about to get a massive infusion of cash and ex officio prestige.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no question that a dramatic lurch into climate disinformation business would be a pronounced embarrassment for a media property that earlier this year dedicated prized cover story real estate to documenting \u201cThe war on science<\/a>\u201d (with the lead exhibit in the case reading \u201cClimate change does not exist\u201d). At the same time, however, the Murdoch empire, while undeniably awash in salacious media abuses<\/a>, has tended to contain its most truth-challenged excesses to the well-branded fief of Fox News. Similar doomsday scenarios greeting Murdoch\u2019s acquisition of The Wall Street Journal\u2019s prestige reporting operation and Vice media\u2019s robust \u2014 if also easily mocked<\/a> \u2014 millennial investigative news brand largely fizzled out. What\u2019s more, Rupert Murdoch\u2019s son James Murdoch, who presides over the 21st Century Fox partnership that oversees Fox News and the new for-profit National Geographic concern, is reportedly a less science-averse soul than his father and even drives a Prius<\/a>.<\/p>\n

None of this is to say, however, that National Geographic and its scientific reputation will emerge unscathed from the Murdoch partnership. They have, in fact, been pre-scathed, thanks to an existing production deal binding National Geographic Television \u2014 far and away the most profitable media holding of the National Geographic Society \u2014 with Fox News. This was, by all reports, the content union that whetted Murdoch\u2019s appetite for this latest market conquest, and it is anything but a testament to impartial scientific inquiry.<\/p>\n

Visit the network\u2019s website<\/a> and you\u2019ll see the same lurid reality fare that fills up any other pseudo-educational cable network\u2019s programming schedule. The latest episode of \u201cUnderworld Inc.<\/a>\u201d for example, is \u201cMoonshine Mayhem<\/a>\u201d \u2014 a dispatch from Appalachia, where a bootlegger named Roscoe walks a tough-talking correspondent through his craft.\u00a0 However, the episode is far more focused on playing up the voyeuristic thrill of cooking up your own spirits just beyond the reach of federal law enforcement than on the science of home brewing. On the other side of the law \u2014 in the interests of fairness and balance, you might say \u2014 \u00a0\u201cSouthern Justice<\/a>\u201d will feature this week \u201cMeth Manhunt<\/a>,\u201d \u201ca tale of three chases in Ashe County, North Carolina, and Sullivan County, Tennessee.\u201d<\/p>\n

Debuting Sept. 15 is the series \u201cDirty Rotten Survival<\/a>,\u201d which features a series of contrived challenges for a team of survivalists to surmount each week. As promo copy for the show puts it, \u201c\u2018Dirty Rotten Survival\u2019 is an outdoor adventure trek seasoned with a dash of grit, \u2018man-genuity\u2019 and a whole lot of MacGyver\u2019ing.\u201d And please don\u2019t confuse it with \u201cLive Free or Die<\/a>,\u201d another National Geographic TV franchise devoted to extreme nature conquest, featuring \u201csix people who have left the modern world behind to live in backwoods and swamps\u201d to \u201chunt their own food, build their own shelters and survive only on what they can produce with their own two hands and sharp intuition.\u201d (Just how one leaves the modern world behind with a full camera crew in tow is one of the series\u2019 many robust challenges to the complacent reign of today\u2019s scientific consensus, I guess.)<\/p>\n

You get the picture. You need not be a MacGyver in today\u2019s bloated reality TV market to recognize that, like the Bravo and A&E franchises before it, National Geographic TV has used the imprimatur of its uplifting educational name as a fig leaf to produce, under the guise of documentary curiosity, a wall-to-wall schedule of freak-show titillation for the sake of freak-show titillation. (And yes, the synergistic footprint of the Fox partnership is quite unmistakable: The network is also airing an adaptation of \u201cKilling Jesus<\/a>,\u201d the wildly successful best-seller by Fox host Bill O\u2019Reilly purportedly undertaken under the direction of God himself. For good measure, when the predictably fact-challenged O\u2019Reilly religious diatribe came under critical review, the maestro of the \u201cNo-Spin Zone\u201d played the Fox-branded Christian discrimination card<\/a>, claiming that his book\u2019s reception meant that \u201cit\u2019s open season on Christians in America.\u201d)<\/p>\n

In short, the Murdoch empire\u2019s annexation of the print arm of National Geographic would seem to show a path forward for the estimable science brand that would stop short of vulgar and outright climate denialism. There\u2019s no need to traffic in outright propaganda, after all, when you\u2019ve already downgraded scientific values into infotainment ones. Michael Parfit, a contributor to the film-documentary and print arms of National Geographic, laid out the insidious method that drives the TV franchise\u2019s shameless exploitation of superstition, shock value and rubbernecking in an expose published in The Toronto Globe and Mail in 2013:<\/p>\n

The approach is sneaky: It\u2019s as if a journalist doing a story on the planet gave equal time to flat-earthers. \u2018On the one hand, photos from space; on the other, it\u2019s flat out your window. If it\u2019s about ghosts or UFOs, the scripts eventually say a quiet \u2018Probably not\u2019 but the music and the imagery screams \u2018OMG!\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

So will the venerable, copiously fact-checked pages of National Geographic now teem with the brazen fables of climate denialism under Rupert Murdoch\u2019s watch? Probably not.<\/p>\n

Still, on the other hand, OMG!<\/p>\n

____________________________________<\/p>\n

Chris Lehmann is an editor for<\/em> BookForum and<\/em> The Baffler and a columnist for <\/em>In These Times. He was the deputy editor of<\/em> The Washington Post Book World from 2000 to 2004.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 aljazeera.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic will lumber on; this deal is all about the boob tube. There\u2019s no need to traffic in outright propaganda, after all, when you\u2019ve already downgraded scientific values into infotainment ones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63916\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}