Gullible Media Necessary For Clean Coal PR Campaign
Center for Media and DemocracyPR Watch.org
by Sheldon Rampton
The coal industry's campaign to “make coal sexy again” has included every trick in the book – even a music video ad featuring supermodels dressed up as coal miners. [BFIA followed the Slate link to the GE site to view the ad but it appears to have been taken down. You can see it here and on YouTube. You may also want to catch the Clean Coal Carolers singing “Clean Coal Night” to the tune of “Silent Night”, and “O Technology” (sung to the tune of “O Christmas Tree”).
David Roberts, an environmental writer for Grist.org, has written a great critique of the coal industry's “clean coal” campaign, pointing out that “it's an obvious scam – easily exposed, easily debunked. Just because it's obvious, though, doesn't mean the media won't fall for it. Indeed, the entire 'clean coal' propaganda push is premised on the media's gullibility.”
The concept of “clean coal” was invented to answer concerns about global warming, and its advocates play a rhetorical game of bait-and-switch on precisely this topic. When pressed about how coal can be clean, Roberts observes, “they revert to the other definition of 'clean' – the notion that coal plants have reduced their emissions of traditional air pollutants like particulates and mercury (as opposed to greenhouse gases).”
To see how this flimflam works on a gullible media, Roberts points to the example of Politico's Erica Lovley, whom he dubs “2008's presumptive frontrunner for Most Gullible Journalist.” (Perhaps we'll have to add that category to next year's Falsies Awards.) He provides an example showing how Lovley allowed a coal industry spokesman to use the bait-and-switch trick to “dispute” the [Center for American Progress] CAP report by changing the subject rather than actually addressing the facts.
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