Somewhere in the United States on August 20, 2013, a technician flicked a switch and Al Jazeera America joined the other networks that bring television news to Americans. At that moment, Al Jazeera became the first new source of American TV news in two decades and the first not owned by Americans. Ali Velshi, who has been charged with the responsibility of establishing Al Jazeera America in the US, explains how Al Jazeera intends to be different from its competitors — a difference that he hopes will win viewers, stimulate informed opinion and widen perspectives in a nation known for its insular views (Maclean’s, Aug. 19/13).

Americans, according to Velshi, are ready for Al Jazeera. The existing networks in the United States, in his analysis, have generally “caused Americans to consume news in smaller, less contextualized bites.” They have “sugar-coated the news… provided news that is consumable at the expense of news that is more important.” As for the quality of American news, Velshi notes, “There’s more money behind dumbing it down than there has been behind commercializing real news.”

The general strategy of the traditional networks, Velshi explains, has been to avoid “real news” by chasing the “fast-paced, popular news” that audiences want, then changing coverage “based on audience reaction.” The coverage of “breaking news” is well represented by the major networks, as is “news about celebrities”. So, too, is gossip, sports and political commentary — usually heavier on personal opinion than illuminating information.

This catering to bias, immediacy and popularity comes at the cost of neglecting substantial stories, important documentaries and investigative journalism. Beneath the surface of consumer advertising, commercial sports and adulated stardom that constitutes most American television are a multitude of serious issues awaiting deeper exploration. This is a deficit that Al Jazeera hopes to fill.

The inclination of the traditional US networks to be superficial helps to explain why the foreign policy and co-operation of one of the most powerful and influential countries in the world seems so discordant with international sensitivities. And it also helps to explain why America seems so disconnected from the environmental crises unfolding in and around it.

Granted, complex and debilitating political dynamics in America are obviously a paralyzing component. But the traditional networks have enabled this paralysis by failing to adequately and thoughtfully explore important subjects of national and international relevance. Indeed, by lowering the quality of news and failing to profile the unfolding challenges of important issues, they have earned their share of blame. The obligation of news networks in a modern democracy is to explore subjects of controversy and tension with the aim of informing and eventually resolving differences so that corrective action can be taken, both in national policy and international agreements. Disseminating informed opinion is the only way of manoeuvring through the complexities of a contemporary world and relating meaningfully with the global community.

This is a deficiency prominently obvious in the United States. And it applies most conspicuously to environmental issues. A syndrome of collective indifference has been created by tragic lapses in political bravery, public imagination and media responsibility. So the ominous body of unreported environmental concerns that keeps expressing itself in thoughtful research and insightful books is conspicuously neglected in network news. The need for the public to be informed — the most essential ingredient for a society to be viable — is compromised by the “smaller, less-contextualized bites” that dominate the news. If Al Jazeera is capable of initiating a deeper search below the surface of subjects, a serious exploration beyond the immediacy of the moment, and a sober consideration beyond the borders of the United States, this is a welcomed addition to the nation’s collective psyche — even though it may challenge narrowly held opinions.

This is not to assume that Al Jazeera is going to cover environmental issues with a diligence that is proportional to the enormity of the challenges. In reality, however, almost every subject has a crucial link to some environmental factor, a trend that is becoming increasingly obvious as climates change, ocean fish stocks deplete, species go extinct, ecologies unravel, pollution goes global, resource extraction becomes more contentious, and the search for energy gets more desperate. So any subject that Al Jazeera thoroughly and thoughtfully explores will likely involve and illuminate environmental information.

Perhaps Al Jazeera America will be a maturing influence for the United States. And it may even have global benefits if the ambitions of Ali Velshi and his television news network raise the calibre of discussions in the United States and elsewhere. As we are discovering with sobering regularity, the world is more complicated than we ever thought. So our understanding of it needs to be smartened up rather than dumbed down. Maybe Al Jazeera can help.

It was ten years ago that I was unceremoniously dumped by CKNW, where I had been for 19 years – nearly 16 as the morning host.

What does that have to do with an environmental web page?

Modesty is not my long suit and I believe that had I stayed, the general public would have been infinitely better served on environmental issues.

A Judge once said to the great Lord Birkenhead, “I have read your brief but am none the wiser.” Birkenhead replied, “Perhaps not, Milord, but much better informed”.

There is no point re-hashing the reasons I was dumped – just let me say it was shameful.

I had three pieces of good luck/good management.

First, when the media got wind of what was happening, two days before NW dumped me, I issued a press release so that they knew what the story was.

Second, timing. I couldn’t have managed it better myself – Brian Coxford ended the 13 minute session of the evening news with two segments.

Segment #1 showed my wife Wendy, friend Russ Fraser, myself and our Labrador waving and smiling (actually Clancy was more wagging his tail) as we took our sailboat out of Thunderbird Marina, while the second showed the “brass” at CKNW putting their hands in the lenses to keep from being seen. Perfect!

Thirdly, the people were magnificent. They were so pressing with their kindnesses. The phones, including my private number, rang all day. Wendy and I scampered to London for a few days and came home to a job offer and the news that I was to receive the Hutchison award for Lifetime Achievement at the forthcoming Jack Webster Awards. I will never forget Christie Blatchford’s column – she was at the Globe – when she said the station ought to have told the lady to “blow it out her ass”.

As it is now, I’ve been airbrushed out of CKNW’s history.

To give you just one example, I delivered a book as a present for Simi Sara after she was hired last year as the afternoon host. I have always tried to encourage women to break through the “glass ceiling” and she is good. It took the station 6 months to deliver it from the front desk to her office! Simi was embarrassed contemplating what I must have thought. The problem, you see, is that under the payout agreement 10 years before, I was not allowed on the 20th or 21st floor of the Toronto Dominion Building without the written approval of the manager! I had broken the rule! Can you imagine the mischief I might have done!

What this is all about is the environment. CKNW as a station now has about a 9 share of the market (meaning, on average, 9% of the market’s radio audience is listening to the station at a given time), with Bill Good at 6 in my former slot. Over the years I was there the station was consistently in high teens and I was often over 20.

CBC, with Rick Cluff in the morning, out-polls Phil Till (a class act, incidentally, as is Jon McComb, who should have taken my show). If I’d been out-polled by anyone I would have considered my options, including jumping out the 21st floor (come to think of it, I wouldn’t do that because I’m scared of heights!).

Look at what has happened in the past 10 years to coverage of environmental issues. To combine a book by Mike Smyth and Vaughn Palmeron the slow but certain death of BC Hydro would be unprintable, not because of the nature of the comment, but because neither of them has written a real word on the subject. In fairness, neither has anyone else, but Palmer and Smyth are supposed to be the heirs of Marjorie Nichols and Jim Hume, to name two.

When I was in Cabinet, I felt the lash from Fotheringham, Webster, Nichols, Burns, Hume, Barbara McClintock – the list is all but endless – every day. Webster was so tough that Premier Bill Bennett would only allow half a dozen ministers to be on his show!

I must admit I was slow to some issues – notably The Kemano II project – but I did get to it and the issue was duly aired. And we received the coveted Michener Award for our efforts.

I was slow to the Campbell Energy Plan, which was declared in 2002. I got there, however, in 2003 and have hammered it since then. The man who put me straight is well known to the media but asked me not to name him.

Think on this: BC Hydro is now technically bankrupt because Campbell forced them to buy all their new power from private power companies at more than double the market price and about 10 times what it costs Hydro to make it itself!

Who in the media has told you about this? How many editorials or columns have you seen on this subject in the past 10 years? The Hume brothers, Scott Simpson, Gary Mason and one or two others have stood back and commented, but not harshly and never demanding that their political commentators colleagues hold the government’s feet to the fire.

Let me give an example of what this uncritical “journalism” has not done. The proposed Enbridge pipeline goes through some of the wildest territory known to man – the Rockies, the Rocky Mountain Trench, the Coast Range and the Great Bear Rainforest. The calamitous Enbridge spill of bitumen into the Kalamazoo River teaches us that cleaning up a spill is well nigh impossible.

Why has no member of the media, except me, asked how Enbridge intends to get heavy duty equipment into a spill in the forbidding terrain where the pipeline is proposed to go? Doesn’t this seem like a pretty basic question?

Is the real answer that Enbridge knows it can’t clean up a spill anyway, so no sense talking about the matter?

I once raised these issues and the Province’s publisher, (I swear in tears), asked “do you really think I tell my writers to write?”

“Wayne, you don’t have to,” I replied.

What newspapers or broadcasters have informed you about fish farms? I got fired at 600AM for hammering at the bastards. Alexandra Morton is a hero and has carried this issue entirely on her own shoulders and such reporting has been pooh-poohed by the newspapers, who apparently give the Executive Director of the fish farmers’ lobby an op-ed piece when requested.  As they do with the private power people, the oil pipe builders and the Fraser Institute.

Let me close with this.

I have no idea whether or not I would have made a difference but I can tell you, I covered those and other environmental issues when I was on air and no owner even hinted at what I should do or say.

When I’m asked about my broadcasting career I say “ I was BC Broadcaster of the Year, was twice short-listed for the Michener Award, I in fact won the Michener, the Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award, am in The Canadian Broadcasters Hall of Fame – during which time I was fired three times!”

We live in an Information Age so we should be able to adequately inform ourselves, make thoughtful decisions and act on matters of importance. We certainly have enough environmental problems to solve these days. Yet we have been eminently poor at addressing most of them. Why? One of the answers may reside in the complex character of the Information Age itself. Professor Viktor Mayer-Schonberger’s book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the New Digital Age (Drew Nelles, Globe and Mail, May 4/13), provides some ideas that lead to possible explanations.

Forgetting, as Professor Mayer-Schonberger notes, is a blessing. It frees us from the oppression of perfect memory, clears the clutter of endless details and allows us to find the illuminating clarity of deep insights and the guiding principles of broad perspectives. Without forgetting, we get lost.

Getting lost seems to be the malaise of our time. The endless details provided by a world of ubiquitous digitization and manic consumerism creates information overload, a barrage of discriminations and choices that are numbing and debilitating. Even worse, such an onslaught of details is demanding and distracting — an insistent and addictive noise that always requires attention. Some of this notion is explored in Delete.

“For almost all of human history,” the professor writes, “collecting information and storing information was time-consuming and costly, and therefore we stored as little as possible.” Finding information was correspondingly difficult. All this has been changed by the digital universe of computers, the internet and search engines. Information is amassed easily, stored quickly, retrieved almost instantly, and never forgotten. Such huge amounts of accessible information has a debilitating quality.

“Human forgetting actually performs a very important function for us individually as well as for society,” Professor Mayer-Schonberger notes. “It lets us act and think in the present rather than be tethered to an ever-more-comprehensive past. The beauty of the human mind and human forgetting is that, as we forget, we’re able to generalize, to abstract, to see the forest rather than the individual tree.”

The overload of current information debilitates us in two ways, neither of which seem to be intuitively obvious. First it locks us into an eternal past because information is always drawing us backwards in time, always away from an existential present — a process that Drew Nelles describes as “an era of endless archiving”. This overload of information is ultimately debilitating because it seems to be endless. So final decisions are conveniently deferred because more information always lurks somewhere in the depth of new research and digital searches. Even scientifically credible opinions on important subjects such as global climate change and the health hazards of pollutants are always made uncertain by the promise of more current and relevant information. Conclusions are forestalled by the digital dissemination of a seemingly infinite variety of opinions, all to be weighed and judged against other conflicting opinions. So firm decisions and remedial actions always await an elusive finality that never comes. Information, in other words, can be paralyzing.

Second — and this seems to contradict the first — an overload of detailed information locks us into an ever-unfolding present, an attribute that, at first glance, should be to our advantage. But it has a dangerous pitfall. In Professor Mayer-Schonberger’s metaphor, an overload of detail commits us to attending to the trees rather than the forest. It mires us in minutiae. We never reach the macro because our attention is always diverted to the micro. Indeed, these mountains of minutiae displace a concept of future. The consequences of collapsing stocks of the ocean’s fish, of pandemic reef death, of marine acidification, of deforestation and weather extremes become distant concerns disconnected from the present by interminable detail. Political governance, located somewhere in an abstract and disconnected future, provides no incentive for people to vote. The enticing pull of massive quantities of detail — information overload — is so confining and debilitating that it cripples our ability to reach the distance and separation needed for perspective. So we forfeit our future to inadvertence, relinquishing our fate to an unplanned unfolding that exposes us to the worst of options.

This was a serious enough problem in the past — our history is littered with the wreckage of civilizations that were incapable of imagining the trajectory of their thinking, their actions and their technologies. For us, the problem is far more serious because the impact of our behaviour is global rather than local. As we have gained increasing amounts of control and influence, we have gained increasingly amounts of responsibility. So we are earning the burden of being the de facto stewards of everything. We cannot enjoy the freedom of letting nature take its course because we have manipulated the flow of rivers, subverted the intrinsic ingenuity of forests, crippled the regenerative power of wild salmon, despoiled the generosity of oceans, enslaved the fields to our crops, polluted the cleansing breezes of air, hurried the slow time of leisure, and traded our innocence for the oppression of information.

Because we cannot afford to forget, we have created a society in which we cannot generalize, anticipate and plan. We cannot learn from history because it has been displaced by the insistence of the immediate. And we cannot plan for a future because it is excluded by the pervasive power of the present. Perspective eludes us because we are mired in a cacophony of detail and complexity. The wisdom that our circumstances demand evades us. So, unable to forget and remember, we muddle and procrastinate our way into an uncertain future.