Saturday, March 10, 2007

The Answer Is, Apparently Not.

The Question? Is there any depth to which the American Enterprise Institute can sink before the DC-NYC-Atlanta media won’t give them a platform?
Posted by olvlzl.

Ben Stewart of Greenpeace
said: "The AEI is more than just a thinktank, it functions as the Bush administration's intellectual Cosa Nostra. They are White House surrogates in the last throes of their campaign of climate change denial. They lost on the science; they lost on the moral case for action. All they've got left is a suitcase full of cash."


Try this experiment. Go to any PBS or NPR*, click on the search feature, type in “American Enterprise Institute” and see how much these allegedly independent news sources depend on the foetid guess pool.

You can go to this site to get some background on the ubiquitous source of corporate and right wing spin. Especially notice the section on its promoting the next disastrous Bush war in Iran. Then you can read the guardian story linked to in the beginning of this piece and see just what kind of thinking those in the tank are doing. And yet, more than a month after the story of them pimping anti-global warming “science” the Diane Rehm show thinks they’re an A list source for talking heads.

For the Congress, they should ask themselves before giving any more support to PBS, NPR or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, why are you funding organizations that act as if the AEI is a legitimate source of information? You should write fairness, equal time, and other requirements into any funding or authorization bills for any public broadcasters. If you don’t they’ll just use their old Rolodex and get the same old whores they’ve been calling on for decades now. The American Public deserves a real media, not what we’re getting now.

* Or just about any other media outlet.