Wednesday, July 21, 2021

Oo, Ah, Bozos in Space

I posted a photo of what Jeff Bezos's rocket looks like some time ago, and the rest of the world found out about it yesterday if they didn't already know.

That's because he got a lot of free air time. As Joshua Potash pointed out on Twitter, using a graphic from Media Matters:

Free coverage for the billionaire space tourism industry vs. informing people about the biggest crisis in history:

Yes, that graph compares morning network show coverage in one day of to an entire year.

And it's not as if these billionaires' ability to fund a personal space-race isn't related to the existence of the climate crisis. But thinking about it on that level would be too big of an ask for anyone in the mainstream media, I know.

But that rocket sure is a funny design.


2 comments:

Michael Leddy said...

I cringed at the amount of time given to Bezos on the news at night. And he was allowed to frame things in terms of the present and the future. Yes, Bezos said, we need to address problems in the present (laundry list followed), but we need to think about the future. So the future is … space tourism? Amazon warehouses on the moon?

Daughter Number Three said...

Or toxic waste dumps, as it sounded like in some of the clips.