Creativity Quote by Peter Garrett

Garrett is doing something pop figures rarely do cleanly: he turns “feelings about the news” into a measurable accusation. By framing media attention as a “ten-fold” imbalance, he’s not just complaining that climate change is ignored; he’s implying that public fear has been curated. Terrorism becomes the high-drama storyline that keeps audiences locked in and politicians mobilized, while climate change, slower and structurally inconvenient, gets treated like background weather.

The line’s power comes from its casual, almost tossed-off delivery. “Probably” and “I think” soften the claim just enough to sound conversational rather than conspiratorial, while “quite an interesting statistic” is a polite euphemism for “this is outrageous.” It’s a musician’s rhetorical move: don’t lecture, drop a lyric-sized truth and let the listener feel the dissonance. Garrett’s history as an environmental advocate (and former politician) hangs behind the sentence, giving it a double edge: he knows how narratives are manufactured, and he knows how hard it is to compete with spectacle.

Subtext: media attention isn’t neutral; it’s an allocation of urgency. If terrorism dominates coverage, it dominates budgets, votes, and our sense of what counts as “real” danger. Garrett is also challenging the audience’s self-image as informed citizens. If the feed is skewed, so is our moral math: we overreact to rare shocks and underreact to the slow violence of a warming planet.