Big Media vs. the Swarm

Beside the bullying behavior of Big Energy, another troubling aspect of the story about environmental activist Panagioti Tsolkas' spirited fight against Florida Power & Light's expansion plans has been the media coverage.

Writing last week for the Palm Beach Post's "Seeing Green" blog, for example, reporter Christine Stapleton called Tsolkas a "self-described anarchist." She also deployed the "anarchist" label in the post's headline.

Now, could you imagine a Big Media reporter calling the CEO of a Big Energy company a "self-described capitalist"? Or the director of a Big Green organization a "self-described social democrat"?

What's the rhetorical purpose of a designation like "self-described anarchist"? To let readers know they shouldn't take the activist's ideas seriously because he inhabits the political "fringe" -- even though some of the United States' most prominent intellectuals inhabit that same "fringe"?
 

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Also troubling is the unwillingness of some Big Media reporters working the Big Energy beat to call a spade a spade.

Take for example a June 11 story on a public hearing about Progress Energy's plans to build a new reactor at the Shearon Harris nuclear plant near Raleigh, N.C. News & Observer reporter John Murawski included the pro-nuclear comments of one Nina Cann-Woode, who he identified as a field representative of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition.

But Murawski did not identify the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition.

Guess it's a grassroots group like Tsolkas' Palm Beach County Environmental Coalition?

If so, guess again.

It's actually a public relations campaign for new nuclear reactors funded by the nuclear industry's trade association and headed by former Bush Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd Whitman -- a fact anyone could learn with a quick visit to the Center for Media and Democracy's SourceWatch website.

But when the swarmers at the N.C. Waste Awareness and Reduction Network contacted the newspaper to ask for a clarification, they were told to write a letter.

For the opinion page.