It’s apparently the season for climate TV, with three significant efforts from National Geographic, as Denise Robbins at Media Matters points out. While many were worried when Murdoch bought National Geographic that its environmental coverage would suffer, it appears as though they are doing everything they can to put those fears to rest with season two of Years of Living Dangerously, an IMAX movie on extreme weather and a documentary from Oscar-winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio.
Never one to let facts get in the way of a post, Anthony Watts has a post (picked up by Drudge) mocking the “Dismal Ratings” of DiCaprio’s Before the Flood. He suggests that the “snoozer” did so poorly because of its “stellar cast of characters,” apparently being sarcastic about the fact that the film features boring nobodies like Elon Musk, Presidents Obama and the Pope.
Not mentioned by Watts is the inconvenient truth that in the couple of days it’s been on Youtube, the full movie has been watched over 7 million times and the Spanish version has another 100,000 views. One might compare these 7 million views to CFACT’s Climate Hustle, as they did when they sent out an email contrasting Leo’s “flop” to their movie that supposedly “packed theaters” and is “now being enjoyed by thousands on DVD and Blu-ray.”
Apparently “thousands” of DVD purchases are a shining success, while millions of views are a flop. Which makes sense if your metric of success is not how many people actually see your content, but how much money you can hustle out of your audience.
[NOTE: this has been edited to reflect that in the time between writing Wednesday afternoon and publication Thursday evening, the view count went from just under 6 million to over 7 million.]
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