FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
“We at Food & Water Watch have called publicly, loudly, for a public takeover of electric utilities and power generation, so that it can actually be governed democratically for the good of the people.”
The way the New York Times covered the Texas energy crisis obscured rather than illuminated its causes.
If media really expect people to actively challenge the promises pushed—aggressively and constantly—by the energy industry, maybe they could do a little more challenging themselves.
While we welcome the demise of an oil industry that does such harm, we have to remember that a creature can do tremendous damage in its death throes, and that a better way forward isn’t guaranteed, unless we fight for it.
“We need to be protecting large swaths of land like the Arctic Refuge, and using them for the future preservation and mitigation of climate change.”
“Exxon, as far back as the 1960s, really knew the extent to which climate change was going to be the path that we were on, the modern kind of climate disruption that we’re seeing, almost a climate disaster happening every week.”
If you’re looking for corporate media to celebrate the good news of the drop in demand for oil, you will be disappointed. Heck, you won’t even find an acknowledgement of the tradeoffs of oil demand and planetary health in last week’s breathless coverage of the unprecedented market collapse.
Before millions were unemployed, before Covid-19 began its sweep, healthcare was already a crisis, and the arguments against overhauling it were already visibly tired and specious.
“This is a huge opportunity for California to create an energy system that’s rooted in climate justice, that’s rooted in the realities of the changing climate, and how they’re going to ensure that they actually are creating a resilient California.”
“Environmental degradation is about… these US corporations, backed by US government, that are allowed to run roughshod over peoples’ lands in the name of, again, profit.”
“We hear a lot about ‘Exxon knew’ and ‘Shell knew’ on the news. But utilities knew too; they were part and parcel to the climate disinformation campaigns.”
At the heart of California’s electrical crisis: climate disruption, of course, but also a private utility system that isn’t now and never has been incentivized to address it.
Corporate media refused to discuss climate change as a factor in this year’s major blackouts in California and New York, described by for-profit utilities as a response to wildfires and extreme heat waves.
“If this landmark ruling—and it is a landmark ruling, make no mistake—does hold up to appeal, then there will be a big celebration in Ecuador, and around the world, for those who support indigenous rights and the environment.”
A former US diplomat to Cuba, Wayne Smith, wrote once that Cuba “seems to have the same effect on American administrations that the full moon once had on werewolves.”
While the mainstream US press has been mainly focused on the Trump administration’s woeful institutional response to Hurricane Maria, it has barely noticed a much more radical political transformation of Puerto Rico, and the potentially disastrous long-term consequences for the citizens who live there.
“This is the way to shut down corporate accountability groups, environmental groups, human rights groups, and to silence them.”
The New York Times is having trouble squaring its hire of climate change denialist Bret Stephens for a regular column with its current PR campaign branding the paper a bastion of rationality in a dangerously “alt-fact” moment.
“The US government gives tens of billions of dollars a year to the fossil fuel industry by way of subsidies, tax breaks, handouts from the American people to an industry that has been in existence for over a hundred years and is doing the work to destroy our planet. “
Every day of the Trump administration brings new reasons to protest. But the mass arrest of hundreds of people protesting the inauguration, along with legal observers and journalists, tells us that the right to speak up still needs protection.
