Don’t Forget to Vote for The 2007 Falsies Awards
I decided to take a quick break from cooking Thanksgiving dinner to remind people to get out and vote for this years Falsies.
The Center for Media and Democracy releases an end of year list of the "most heinous polluters of the information environment over the past year". These are people who take spin and propaganda to all new lows. These awards have been issued annually since 2004, and its now time to vote for the 2007 entries.
This years candidates are (in no particular order):
- Glowing Green – Nuclear Energy Institute with PR firm Hill & Knowlton for the launch of the "Clean and Safe Energy Coalition" in April 2006 to promote the idea that building new nuclear reactors would help solve global warming. They managed to keep the fact that was all funded by the trade association, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), and headed by former Bush Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Christine Todd Whitman and former Greenpeace activist Patrick Moore, who left that group in 1986. Whitman and Moore’s credentials were spun like mad to make them appear to be "environmentalists" who have seen the light and now support nuclear power. The PR folks traded heavily on Moore’s involvement with Greenpeace over twenty years ago to punch up the message.
- War More Years – MoveOn.org and the new Democratic majority have not kept their promises on getting US troops out of Iraq. In fact, MoveOn.org (Disclaimer: I generally support MoveOn.org and have donated money to them in the past) sent out a survey to its members when the first House spending bill on Iraq was under threat of veto to allow members a say in what position MoveOn should support. MoveOn’s Eli Pariser described the survey in an email as an opportunity for members to participate in "a big decision coming up this week. … MoveOn is a member-directed organization — we believe that all of us, together, are smarter than any one of us." In fact, however, MoveOn’s survey was designed to conceal from its members the option of supporting the stronger anti-war amendment put forth by the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
- Tricky Wiki – Virgil Griffith’s Wikiscanner opened up a big can of worms when it became clear that more than 180,000 organizations have made anonymous edits to Wikipedia articles, often in violation of Wikipedia’s well defined policies. Perpetrators include the FBI, CIA, Britain’s Labour Party, the Vatican, Wal-Mart, the Republican and Democratic parties, the Church of Scientology, Dell Computers, Microsoft, Apple, the United Nations, and Diebold, the maker of electronic voting machines as well as several well known Public Relations firms.
And ten more nominees…
Past winners include:
- Gold Falsies Award of 2005 – The Video News Release Industry – In March, the New York Times reported, "At least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years. … Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgment of the government’s role."
- Golden Falsies Award of 2006 – The ABCs of History – The most false of Falsies goes to the American Broadcasting Corporation. ABC used the fifth anniversary of the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States as an opportunity to rewrite history, broadcasting "The Path to 9/11," a six-hour "docudrama" written and produced by conservative filmmakers. The made-for-TV blockbuster placed the lion’s share of the blame for the attacks on alleged failures of the Clinton administration.
Any time! It’s easy to confuse issues with the presentation of the issues. For some people there seems to be no difference at all. Look at ACLU bashing by the conservative talk radio folks and you can see that problem in action.
JD, thanks for correcting my misunderstanding. I’ve gone over to the prwatch website and understand better what’s being voted on. Yep, there are some winners there!
Sure, anyone can vote. But keep in mind the Falsies has nothing to do with environmentalism or environmentalists. It’s about the so called “news” industry spinning or allowing itself to be spun. The Nuclear Energy issue thats up for a vote this year is about truth in advertising and letting people see the truth behind what they are being told and then making a decision.
I’m with you, I think nuclear energy beats the hell out of the current trend towards building more coal burning power plants in almost every way.
One thing I do wonder about is how much fuel for nuclear reactors we have available in the long term but I readily admit ignorance there. Scratch that - I checked out your site and read the info from the IAEA and now I feel better.Does everyone get to vote on this? I vote for the phony environmentalists who persist in opposing nuclear energy.
Consider what nuclear gets us:
(1) An electricity source that doesn’t depend on wind or sunlight or the limited amount of energy storage available, and emits virtually no greenhouse gases. It could reduce CO2 emissions by 40%.
(2) An energy-efficient way to produce hydrogen, which could be used directly in automobiles and trucks or added to biofuels to make their production higher by a factor of three. Presently, transportation accounts for about 33% of CO2 emissions; all of that could be eliminated through conservation, electrification, and alternate fuels.
(3) A huge reduction in air pollution, lowered trade deficits, and freedom from Middle-East involvements.
The simple truth is that we won’t shut down all the homes and businesses when there isn’t enough wind and sunlight to power them. We won’t make people stay home in their cold, dark houses. If nuclear energy isn’t developed in a major way, the world will keep burning fossil fuels. Within fifty years nearly all the world’s people will live in severe hardship and the natural environment will have completely disappeared.