As they drill for quick corporate profits deep inside our Earth, ExxonMobil, Halliburton, and other titans of the natural gas hydraulic fracturing industry are harming people’s health, the environment, and local economies across the country. They’re also fracking something essential to a properly functioning democratic society: the truth.
They’re hailing themselves both as exemplars of free-market success and as the “virtuous ones” in our society — the producers and makers, as contrasted to the mass of Americans that the far-right corporatists are now openly calling “moochers” and “takers.”
Fracking companies and political front groups are selling the public a self-serving narrative. They claim the current natural gas boom is a victory over those wimpy and undeserving producers of wind and solar power who are dependent on government subsidies to get up and running.
The shale gas boom, wrote the oil-and-gas-funded American Enterprise Institute this year, has occurred “away from the greedy grasp of Washington.” AEI’s laissez-faire fabulists snidely added that “surely Washington would have done something to slow it down, tax it more, or stop it altogether” had the bureaucrats realized that the private enterprise was making such progress. Indeed, crowed an industry PR group, “The free market has worked its magic.”
Sheesh — their bull goes deeper than their fracking gas wells. For three decades, the federal government has pumped more than $100 million into research for the frackers, finding ways to make the technique work. And, since 1980, the big bad government they now badmouth has paid frackers more than $10 billion in a subsidy written specifically for them. These oil giants are liars, fracking away at their own integrity.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
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