Wow. I just endured an amazing puff piece on water issues in the West. Entitled Desert Wars: Water and The West, it’s quite possibly the biggest propaganda piece I’ve ever watched on water in the west. I link to it only for indexing results, it’s hardly even worth the click-through.
The program taps such authorities as a history professor at UNLV (who keeps reminding us about our misconceptions regarding Las Vegas’ water use) to the clearly unbiased water development and public relations folks of Las Vegas (“We’re always striving for unique ways to be better water stewards” – like placing flyers on people’s doors).
After half-heartedly interviewing the clearly backwards alfalfa growers in the rural regions of Utah and Nevada, Desert Wars concludes that water usage problems are due to agriculture and not at all to Las Vegas’ explosive growth. Huh? Who funded this, the Bush administration “EPA”?
Production wise, Desert Wars is a complete disaster. The voice over script is terrible, consisting of one-liners clearly recorded and perhaps even spliced together one-by-one. There is no logical flow from one sentence to another.
How the producer ever got funding to make this project after the truly brilliant “Cadillac Desert” book and documentary is beyond me. Where have you gone, Marc Reisner?
