FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
“This rulemaking process is supposed to be about protecting community members and making sure pipelines are safe, not about preventing protests.”
Editorials omitted crucial information about the status of Wet’suwet’en territory and United Nations positions on Indigenous self-determination, cherry-picked aspects of Canadian law that serve their arguments, and endorsed state repression of land defenders and their supporters irrespective of the violence this would entail.
There will only be an increasing number of frontline struggles between extractive, climate-disrupting industry and those willing to stand up to it. Corporate media’s inadequate attention, and unwillingness to truly call out the moneyed interests causing present and future harms, make them more often part of the problem than the solution.
What is the state of our democracy when journalists are arrested for “obstructing government functions” and their cameras are seized “as evidence”?
“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.
The New York Times minimizes Keystone’s impact on the climate, in the service of false balance and downplaying the impact of Trump’s anti-environmental moves.
One almost gets the sense that editors writing headlines like these have enlisted themselves on the sheriff’s team, waving spectators away with a “nothing to see here, folks.”
“It took a whole lot of fighting, it took a whole lot of people getting hurt and really living this struggle, in order for this to be seen. So we’re at a critical juncture in terms of making sure that this does not become unseen, that it does not lose the attention that it’s gained.”
What if instead of getting lost in Trump’s machinations, media looked at what deals like the one that actually happened with Carrier actually wind up meaning for workers and local economies?
The New York Times gets a failing grade for its headline over a report on escalating police violence against Native American activists and others defending the Missouri River against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
“A lot of people I’ve met here say, look, this is not about what happened 500 years ago. We want people to know that and learn that. This is about what they’re doing to us today.”
Corporate Media’s main method of undermining the significance of what’s happening in North Dakota has been to simply ignore it. If that maneuver is failing, it’s due to independent media working to get the stories from Standing Rock out, despite on-the-ground intimidation and big media’s studied disinterest.
While elite media wait for the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline to go away so they can return to presenting their own chin-stroking as what it means to take climate change seriously, independent media continue to fill the void with actual coverage.
But most national US outlets—the ones who complain about not getting a seat on a candidate’s plane—breathed not a word on North Dakota’s assault on the press’s ability to cover a major story of the moment.
As of this writing, no TV outlet included in the Nexis database has mentioned that independent journalist Amy Goodman was charged with trespassing for reporting on the pipeline protest. Nor has any national newspaper reported on North Dakota’s legal assault on newsgathering.
The broadcast news networks have aired exactly one report on the Dakota Access Pipeline protests since the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe began an encampment against the project in April, according to a search of the Nexis news database.
“This is not just a fight about this one pipeline. This is a fight to protect our planet for all of us as humanity.”
For many people, what’s happening right now in North Dakota is a crucial story of a frontline fight of indigenous people against extractive industry—and on behalf of humanity, really, and the planet.
A story in the New York Times about the Keystone pipeline isn’t really about the Keystone pipeline.
