Barak Obama observed that “one of the biggest challenges we have to our democracy is the degree to which we do not share a common baseline of facts”. I would further this and contend that, when the current catastrophic state of the climate is considered, the challenge is not just to our democracy, but to humanity…

“First simplify, then exaggerate”(David, 2018, p.192) is an old journalistic proverb; a “secret formula for writing a good news story”(Dutton, 2017). But does this not contradict the original purpose of journalism; the very reason people read the news?…

Not only is important information trivialised, but “more and more news is so exaggerated that it is simply wrong, misinformation”(Dutton, 2017). As a result, as Professor Bill Dutton theorised, “no one will take political rhetoric or news media seriously”(Dutton, 2017). We lose trust in anything that claims to inform us, even if that information is crucial to instigating actions against global catastrophes like climate change. We become desensitised to “enlightenment concepts such as the ‘truth’” which “are overused and overemphasised to the point they are meaningless and cease to have the currency they once had”(Gilroy-Ware, 2017 p. 169)…

“Advertising is not about catering to existing needs, but creating new desires. Not only desires, but insecurities as well, because we cannot desire without feeling we lack something”(Raoul, 2019).

In the 1930s, Edward Berneys (who is often referred to as “the father of Public Relations”) ensured that our culture “shift[ed][…] from a needs to a desires culture”(Rosenberg, n.d.) and ever since, the instinctual human need for validation - which has evolved within us as a survival instinct - has been preyed upon and exploited by the media.

In a culture that is obsessed with appearances and is too time-poor and preoccupied with trivial distractions to explore the nuance of issues, there is a tendency to “[prefer] the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence”(Debord, 2014, p.1). The result is a loss of the original meaning. This is known as recuperation.