We’ve hardly been shy about how not only is Fox news bad, but that most all TV news rots your brain and consistently misleads viewers. And it’s hardly a secret that we more or less operate under the assumption that everyone who regularly rejects climate science does so because they’re paid by the fossil fuel industry, an axiom that we’ve found is only very rarely wrong.
But now we have the confluence of these two ideas. Media Matters’ Eric Hananoki reported yesterday that David Urban, one of CNN’s recurring commentators who has attacked the Green New Deal and praised Trump’s pro-polluter agenda, is actually a lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry. (Additionally, Urban is also a lobbyist for defense contractors, which explains his support for bombing Iran, part of his years-long work at CNN lobbying the public without disclosing his financial incentive for doing so.)
After Hananoki’s reporting on Urban, CNN did disclose at the top of a segment that Urban is an energy and defense lobbyist. But that just leads one to wonder why CNN’s own staff never bothered to check out their own commentator’s background. Or if they did, why they didn’t disclose his affiliations sooner. And perhaps most startling, now that they know, why do they continue to allow him to use their network on behalf of his clients?
Could it be because cable news channels like CNN are more about the ad revenue and ratings than keeping the public informed? Or that TV producers simply don’t care that they’re offering up their platform as a tool to disseminate the industry’s talking points, so long as they can keep viewers tuned in? Surely not!
Now, some might argue that CNN et al are still doing the public a service by showing their audience what the industry’s position is on issues, which is similar to the justification for inviting liars from the Trump administration on to, well, lie to America.
But if that were the case, they would disclose this information and use it to frame the questions. It would not be difficult for CNN’s hosts to ask Urban a question like, “What do your industry clients think about this issue that’s relevant to their profits?”
And then once he answers, they could turn to someone whose job isn’t to protect private profits to provide a rebuttal, clarification, or debunking that offers the audience the proper context for understanding the likely misleading nature of the lobbyist’s claims.
Sure, lobbyists have a very specific sort of expertise, which could certainly shed some light on how things operate in America. But in failing to accurately frame that expertise as serving its clients’ profits and not necessarily the truth, CNN and others are actively assisting in the poisoning of not just the public discourse, but of the planet itself.
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