The New State Media: Brought to You by America's Ruling Oligarchs
State media is here. It isn’t Pravda per se but 425± “newsrooms” scattered about the nation and doing the devil’s work. The devil is in this case is our ruling gentry class who fund the propaganda.
They are organized as the Institute for Nonprofit News, which was founded in 2009 via something called the The Pocantico Declaration. Pocantico, of course, is the Rockefeller family estate in Westchester County, New York. It is now the Pocantico Conference Center operated by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
Here is picture of the founders taken at Pocantico in 2009 and prominently displayed on the INN’s website:
If one reads the list of founders at the end of the declaration it quickly becomes obvious the INN is a Rockefeller-Soros creation. The Rockefeller connections include not only the Rockefeller brothers Fund but also, for example, the Columbia School of Journalism, which serves as a spin room for the Family’s “ExxonKnew” campaign.
The Soros connection comes through the funding given INN by the Open Society entities controlled by Soros. The Center for Public Integrity, which is another Soros organization, sent four members to the confab at Pocantico. There are, no doubt, many other connections.
The Declaration is all blather but the opening is interesting (emphasis added):
Resolved, that we, representatives of nonprofit news organizations, gather at a time when investigative reporting, so crucial to a functioning democracy, is under threat. There is an urgent need to nourish and sustain the emerging investigative journalism ecosystem to better serve the public.
There’s nothing much wrong with this statement but the “crucial to a functioning democracy” is a case of “the lady that doth protest too much.”
Democracy, as a word, has been corrupted over the last several years. It was, for many years, a harmless substitute term for our form of government — that of a republic. Now, it seems to have evolved into something quite different; a catchall intended to suggest support for popular rule but only as elites would have it. It is routinely thrown out as an appeal to some sort of revolution by those who aim to consolidate power so as to rule the people.
The tipoff this is happening with INN is that, while real investigative reporting is indeed crucial, the INN only investigates one side. Its work amounts strictly to propagandizing on behalf of that side. An example is provided by a story I did in late 2016 about some investigative work done by Public Source, a member of the INN network:
Public Source while disclosing its largely fractivist funding sources, tells us little about who it really is philosophically other than the prattle about being “purely fact-finding.” It was created by the Pittsburgh Foundation in 2011 which told us just how fractivist it was with this statement from its 2011 Annual Report:
“With the boom in Marcellus Shale drilling the past several years, a great deal of attention has focused on the threat that hydraulic fracturing poses to the region’s water. A newer and growing concern, however, is the degree to which the new industry is aggravating Greater Pittsburgh’s already-prominent air pollution problem.”
Doesn’t sound much like “purely fact-finding” was ever part of the mission, does it? And, there’s very little, if any, fact-finding offered in this instance. The whole story is about how PublicSource and the Environmental Health Project (funded by the Heinz Endowments) conducted an air quality study, if you can call it that, in Penn Township, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania with something called a Speck™ sensor.
It’s a pretty interesting little device but is promoted as an “indoor air quality monitor empowering you to breathe easier,” not as a sophisticated piece of scientific testing equipment…
PublicSource suggests the Speck™ sensors are still good for spotting trends “in exploratory surveys (like ours) to get an idea if there is a pollution problem and if more robust air monitoring is needed.” They refer to the EHP report and state a “mountain of evidence seems to be building” against the shale industry. They also employ anecdotal evidence in the form of commentary from resident James Moore who lives 500 feet from an Apex Energy well pad and says he “suspected the gas site was emitting pollution that he couldn’t see, hear or feel” as if that was a meaningful contribution.
If you look real carefully over Moore’s right shoulder you’ll see some larger buildings. I wondered what they were, so I looked up the location of the Apex well pad and then checked Google Earth. This is what I found when I turned the street view to the left and moved ahead a bit:
You can see Moore’s buildings on the right and several large traffic generating commercial/industrial buildings right next door. Here’s a closeup of one that is located perhaps 1,300 – 1,400 feet from Moore’s house:
Here’s an aerial view of the neighborhood:
You can see the well pad slightly right of center in the picture. Moore’s house is across the street, halfway between the two intersections. Notice Route 22 to the north about 1,000 – 1,200 feet away. It’s a 4-lane highway carrying 20,000 vehicles of traffic per day. Look at the development surrounding Moore’s house. There is commercial/industrial development in every direction within a quarter-mile. Think any of this might be a factor in whatever the indoor air quality measuring Speck™ sensors picked up?
The answer, of course, is obvious to anyone not out to make a fractivist case, but there’s more. Consider these factors:
These measurements were conducted with indoor air quality monitoring equipment operated by volunteers “trained” by EHP and Public Source.
The study provides no baseline data regarding air quality conditions before drilling and fracking. References to baseline in the report refer, instead, to those periods between peaks when the air quality is well within EPA standards and rates “good to moderate.”
There is no data to suggest air quality is better or worse than it was before drilling and fracking came to the area.
The study also bizarrely attempts to base its conclusions on peak, rather than average data on the theory there must be a cumulative effect. It even adds the peaks together and then compares them to the EPA standard as if that was a valid method of testing quality, only admitting, almost as an afterthought, the EPA “does not address peak exposures from PM 2.5.”
There is still more that is wrong, but you get the idea…
This is how fake fractivist news is made and echoed by special interest foundations funding junk science and spreading it around. I can only think of one word to describe it; deplorable. That’s Heinz for you.
And, that’s the INN for you. It’s nothing but state media delivered through NGOs owned by ruling gentry class elites. They are destroying this nation although I think the tables are starting to turn.
#INN #Journalism #NonprofitNews #Rockefeller #Soros #StateMedia