This week our friends at the Department of Energy and Climate Change announced that they will be stopping those stupid subsidies to onshore windfarms a year earlier than originally suggested: April next year, to be precise. This news was heartily welcomed at Pale Green Vortex. But then a most interesting thing happened.....
Eager to find out a little more about the precise implications, I took the unusual (for me) step of checking out half a dozen or so mainstream 'news' outlets on the internet. What I found was that they were all saying precisely the same things. Often to the letter. There were quotes from the normal suspects about how this was very bad for 'the industry', very bad for the economy, very bad for the environment, and the end of the world was pretty nigh. Fergus 'Mr Windfarm' Ewing was predictably up in arms about how it was going to destroy the hopes and dreams of the Scottish people. But nowhere did I read a word about the thousands of people around Britain who must have been given a little hope that their local environment might not, after all, be destroyed by these industrial post-apocalyptic monstrosities. Not a word about the people who have campaigned for years with logic and reason against the march of the turbines. You need to go to the 'comments' sections below the articles to find these folk out in abundance.
The uniformity and one-sidedness of the mainstream reportage points to one thing: the importance of the press release. Organisations promoting these forms of sometime energy, notably renewables UK; so-called environmental and charitable organisations that have been hijacked by political causes, notably Greenpeace, F of the E, and the WWF; not to forget our upholders of righteousness in the Green Party. All these are specialists in self-publicity and the art of the press release. Publicity and propaganda, moulding their self-image and public opinion, are their main stock in trade. While increasing numbers of people are wising up to the dynamics of 'the news', still these organisations remain remarkably successful in their strategy. Hit people hard enough and frequently enough with the same half-truths dressed up in moralism, and sufficient people will eventually succumb for you to be able to claim success in the opinion wars.
I have mentioned before the research carried out by Nick Davies in 2008. In his investigations of four 'quality papers' he discovered that 80% of stories were wholly, mainly, or partly constructed from second-hand sources: press releases from news agencies and the public relations industry. 'Facts' provided from these places were being checked in only 12% of cases. In the case of the windfarm subsidies, it seems to me that the figures are closer to 100% and 0% respectively. This is the way that public opinion is fashioned - that is to say, people are treated like pawns on a chessboard and manipulated to serve the often nefarious purposes of others. Pale Green Vortex has waved this flag before, and will do so again, I suppose. Passionately. Don't be suckered by the mainstream media. Give it a wide berth. Visit its toxic outposts as rarely as possible. Over-exposure inevitably leads to personal delusion. It is frequently nonsense, and frequently dangerous. It is after your mind; don't give it away......
