Thursday, December 30, 2004

Kennedy on Coverage of Environmental Issues

I heard Bobby Kennedy Jr. on "Counterspin," broadcast on WPKN, as I was driving to the Route 1 strip in Norwalk today to exchange a defective DVD player. He was talking about how his book (Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals are Plundering the Country and Highjacking our Democracy), and environmental issues in general, got little attention from the press during the presidential campaign.
I tuned in near the end and heard only a handful of examples: A producer from Aaron Brown's CNN show cancelled a Kennedy appearance at the last minute because she did not want to hear any Bush-bashing, he said. When he asked the Kerry campaign why they weren't talking about environmental issues more often, they told him that in fact they were but that the press was ignoring them. He said Bob Schieffer's debate questions sounded as if they were written by Karl Rove.
His summary: the press is supposed to speak truth to power but their coverage of the campaign was, in his word, disgusting.
I like Kennedy and I'm grateful that he wrote the foreword to my book (for free, moreover). I don't think there is a better spokesman for traditional environmentalism on the national level than him.
Here's a link to the Counterspin interview. Here's a link to Kennedy's book, and here's a link to a book that contains something he wrote that's a bit shorter and which is a lot lower in the Amazon sales rankings.

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