The New York Times runs a story about how Tea Party "Activists Fight Green Projects, Seeing U.N. Plot." The paper doesn't bother to counteract the ludicrous claims by the "activists" until deep down in the story, and then it's halfhearted at best. Stephens argues MSM fans the flames of a fire ignited by the fossil-fuel industry in collusion with policy shapers and framers of the radical right. Let's counteract the nonsense.

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The corporate-state collusionist framing is working. It's not just a few "Tea Party crazies" in Virginia who now think sustainable development is a plot against "the American way." And MSM isn't helping.

The February 3, 2012 piece in the New York Times by Jared Soares titled  "Activists Fight Green Projects, Seeing U.N. Plot"  underscored how successful framing can be.

Even though this framing was used in all the wrong ways by some viciously evil but clever fear-mongers, we can learn from its absurd success. It has apparently convinced many people in states countrywide (not just in the South) that environmental measures are a foreign plot to steal good ol' U.S. Americans' god-given rights to murder the planet one household at a time.

Corporate Media Business as Usual: Uncritical "Reporting"

We should take critical note of how this story was "reported" in the Times. Instead of sending it up as the preposterous propaganda of a fossil-fuel-backed campaign orchestrated to look like a populist movement, the writer waits until paragraph 21 to even mention that "other conservatives" might not agree with the conspiracy believers. The quote used, though, is completely incomprehensible and sheds no light on the matter. 

The next paragraph -- paragraph 22, deep down in the story, is the first to even vaguely introduce a counterargument to the teabaggers' hysteria. And it's just plain wimpy. 

That's not surprising. When it comes to standing up for the environment or common sense, or, indeed, anything that is critical of the radical rightwing, mainstream media like the  NYTimes  fails every time. Why use half-baked terms such as "some local officials argue" and then ease into a gentle suggestion that the environmental programs being protested are actually money-savers?

Why not just come out and say that people are easily hoodwinked, and that this movement is backed by rich and powerful corporations that want to keep us enslaved to fossil fuels and inefficient automobiles until we bake ourselves to a crisp?

This is the usual lazy kind of "reporting" done all too often by MSM that are too timid to take a stand for truth over BS. And why is it only in paragraph 22 that even an attempt is made to show the other side? There should have been a counterargument in paragraph two, or three at latest. SHAME on the "journalist" and editor.

Just before this, in paragraph, 19, the writer inserted the following:

The Republican National Committee resolution, passed without fanfare on Jan. 13, declared, "The United Nations Agenda 21 plan of radical so-called "sustainable development' views the American way of life of private property ownership, single family homes, private car ownership and individual travel choices, and privately owned farms; all as destructive to the environment."

The RNC statement on Agenda 21 shows just how embedded this is crazy thinking, fueled by the extreme rightwing John Birch Society's flagship publication New American. There are obviously a whole lot of people who'll actively and willfully continue to do their personal best to hasten catastrophic global climate change.

Yet the Times writer offers no comment on this, let alone an intelligent rebuttal. No quote from, say, the Center for Media and Democracy's Lisa Graves, who is working so hard to expose ALEC and awaken the nation to the fact that corporations, not people, are writing our environmental and energy laws, or Greenpeace's Phil Radford, or Starhawk, or a grassroots sustainability activist, or independent environmental journalists from Grist or Orion or Sea Change Radio or DeSmog Blog, or any of a number of other unembedded, non-industry-connected individuals. This is lousy journalism at best.

All the radical anti-environmental right did was plant a seed among an uninformed, easily frightened population. They trained a few spokespeople to get up in public meetings and connect a few dots, even as idiotic as these dots-connections are. 

There can be no question that this movement is backed by the oil-gas-coal industry and funded by the likes of T. Boone Pickens, Ted Turner, and the Koch brothers and their cronies.

Of course, it helps to have a powerful and, pathetically, popular TV network at your beck and call, as the Tea Partiers do, to evangelize your outrageous claims.

It's especially bizarre that these hoodwinked people actually believe "smart counters" on their electrical meters are tracking them and taking over their lives, when most of them probably use E-Z Pass or a GPS or smart phone or  Onstar  or ATMs or Facebook or Google or Yahoo or one of the many other devices and  sites  that actually DO track them. 

Counterbalancing the Lies

We need to attend these community meetings where these frightened uninformed and misinformed people are playing into industry's plan by pushing to crush sensible public policy.

We could use a massive funding campaign for viable sustainability-promoting nonprofits that are being cut off because of communities' fear of "Tea Party" backlash -- à la the way Planned Parenthood received such a massive outpouring of support after the Susan G. Komen Foundation so stupidly defunded it for political reasons.

We sure don't want to take money from big organizations; heaven knows, many if not most of the "Big Greens" are quite corrupted. But, if enough of us each gave $25 (or as much as we can afford) to our local sustainability-promoting, antifracking, anti-mountaintop blasting, anti-tar-sands-extraction, anti-nuclear, pro-renewable-energy, or climate-change-focused community grassroots groups, and another $25 (or as much as we can afford) to one of the independent media that are reporting these issues, we would tell politicians the ignoramuses aren't the only ones who can be vocal.

Most important, thought, we need to show up. We need to talk to our neighbors, and make sure they have good information, not hysteria-inducing corporate-state propaganda. Then, once we've found a couple of allies, we need to go together to the town board and city council meetings. We must stand up and speak out, to counteract the B.S. with facts.

Once we have that small cadre of allies, the numbers will grow. Then we can divvy up duties. One of them should be to scan mainstream media reporting of environmental issues, and to take a few minutes to write a quick rebuttal when we see shoddy or deliberately misleading stories like that from the New York Times discussed above. 

Only if we continue to call them out on this and hold their feet to the fire will MSM even consider doing any real journalism. It may be too late for the Times -- probably is -- but if enough people begin seeing it and other such corporate media for what they are and stop buying them, maybe support for good indy journalism will prosper more.

Plant the wrong seeds, and choking poison weeds grow.

Plant the right seeds, and nurturing beautiful plants grow. Let's get the seeds started. 

Authors Bio:
An independent journalist, theater artist, educator, activist, and public speaker, Maura Stephens writes and presents most regularly about media, environmental issues, and national and international politics. Her work frequently appears in AlterNet.org and TruthOut.org.

Stephens spent 19 years in mainstream media working her way up the ranks at Newsweek and Newsweek International magazines. Disillusioned with the way journalism was changing, she left to start up an early e-zine and then moved into the non-corporate realm as editor of ICView magazine, the magazine of Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York. Now associate director of the Park Center for Independent Media, she works with FAIR founder and media watcher Jeff Cohen.

Stephens was founding codirector of Iraqi Refugees Assistance Connection and was the U.S. spokesperson and senior strategist for the International Campaign for Freedom of Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma. She also spent many years as an organic farmer, growing almost all of her family's food. When she lived in the city she kept up her passion for growing things at the New York Botanical Garden. There she joined the team that started Bronx Green-Up, a community project that reclaimed abandoned, waste-strewn urban lots and turned them into green oases; BGU became a model for other such urban gardening projects around the country.

Now much of Stephens's energy goes toward fighting the corporate harms of fracking as a cofounder of the Coalition to Protect New York. She is also a member of other grassroots groups fighting to protect people and nature from the devastation wreaked by this relatively new and rampantly invasive practice of the Big Gas industry.

Stephens teaches multimedia journalism and citizen journalism, as well as creative writing, in various venues. She believes in using media and the arts for positive and sustainable social change. She holds an M.F.A. in playwriting from Goddard College and is a three-time graduate of Democracy School.