The largest power company in the state of Alabama has purchased their own “news websites” to help spread propaganda and to downplay the health risks of the toxins that they are dumping in the state. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: The largest power company in the state of Alabama has purchased their own news website to help spread propaganda and to downplay the health risks of the toxins that they’re dumping in the state. This is such a crazy story. Okay. First of all, you have to start off with the analysis. What’s the heart of this story? The heart is LA Times, layoffs, going outta business. Washington Post, barely hanging on, but for Bezos owns it. He’s got more money than 10 Nations. He can keep it alive. Vice, Vice News, under. Sports Illustrated. You know, so there’s layoffs, thousands of journalists are being laid off. We’ve already been, for the last 20 years, there’s been no such thing as investigative journalism. It doesn’t exist. They can’t afford it. They don’t wanna pay an investigative reporter to go study anything. And so this is the state of the American media right now. Now add to that, you’ve got a utility company, one of the biggest utility companies in the nation. In one of the poorest, poorest states in the nation, with the highest bills in the nation, that they own the news in Alabama. Is that an overstatement?
Farron Cousins: No. And in fact, they’ve gone to the next step of, originally what they could do is they could do all the advertising on the local channels. They get in good. They know these people. They can get the favorable coverage they want. But Alabama Power decided to take it a step further. You know what? We, because of the internet, anybody can run a news website. So they said, why don’t, let’s just build our own news website where we put out what they call the good news. Because we don’t wanna focus on the bad in Alabama. They wanna focus on good things and all of the good things are about how amazing Alabama Power is, even as they just made an agreement where they’re now allowed to import coal ash toxins from other states and dump ’em into the poor communities in Alabama. And that’s a good thing.
Mike Papantonio: Well, okay, residents of the seventh poorest state in all of America, have the most expensive monthly electric bills in the United States topping $700 a month. Now, these are people barely hanging on. But the story really started where these people said, Alabama Power and light, you’re killing us. You have this dust that’s causing lung disease. It’s causing neuropathies. It’s causing really health problems for our children. It’s giving our children asthma. And would you do something about it? It’s got mercury, it’s got arsenic, it’s got cadmium in it. And they said, nah, I don’t think we’re gonna do anything about it. I think we’re just gonna make it sound good. We’re gonna give you some good news. That literally, what you just said is literally the words they used. That is that we’re buying the News Center Operation. That’s what it’s called, News Center Operation. And it’s entirely paid for by the electricity customers. You understand? They’re charging these customers that are complaining, you’re killing us with the environmental disaster you’ve caused and you’re killing us ’cause we can’t afford to pay for this. But then they have those same customers paying for this thing that’s called the News Center Operation, which is supposed to be good news. We’re only gonna report good news, right? Did I get that right?
Farron Cousins: Absolutely. And a lot of times, well, in the past, I guess these corporations, what they would do is instead of buying their own news website, they would send money to think tanks or industry front groups. And those front groups would be the ones that would run these websites and do these phony studies saying that, oh, climate change isn’t real, or these chemicals, yeah, they’re giving you cancer, but they sure taste good. They would give it to these other companies that would then do it. But Alabama Power decided to streamline the process. We’ll cut out the middleman. We don’t have to send $20 million to this think tank. We can spend a million and fund this website for five years.
Mike Papantonio: You understand that they’re actually writing the news stories.
Farron Cousins: Yes.
Mike Papantonio: They’re writing the news stories and then they’ll send it to something like the, this is really, this is doubly bad, The Birmingham Times. The Birmingham Times, historically, all the way back to 1964 has been an avenue that African Americans in Alabama would rely on because it would give them the news that affects them. Not anymore. Now, these stories are created by The Birmingham Times, and sometimes written by the power company. And then they’re just passed on, the good news is passed on that, hey, you’re really not gonna die of this stuff. It’s okay. Or, hey, yeah, your costs are going up a little bit, but we have to do that so we can bring you better service. It’s the sickest story. And again, it’s the poorest state in the union in some of the poorest counties within that poor state. And nobody’s doing anything. Have you seen this story anywhere?
Farron Cousins: No, no. This is the first time I’ve seen it.
Mike Papantonio: It’s Guardian.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, of course.
Mike Papantonio: So, the truth is, this is one of the dirtiest power plants in the country, and nobody’s paying any attention to this.
Farron Cousins: No. And what this is really is this is a blueprint for other corporations to start doing the same thing. You know, Exxon is not gonna have to send money to all these think tanks to write their stories. Hey, let’s start our own Exxon news website. And just like Alabama Power, and Pfizer could do it, Merck could do it, DuPont could do it. But what they do is they get their news site certified, and once they get it certified through Google News, through, all the other news services, whatever, it then becomes legitimate. So it goes into the PR newswires. Once you get it in the newswire, you can get it published anywhere in the country.
Mike Papantonio: Exactly. Now you understand that this is the other part of it. I’m not making this up. The employees for the Alabama Power plant company, they’re the people that are going to work for the news sources. Do you understand that? They’re saying, okay, I can give you a better job. You’re only making $25 an hour. How about you go to work for our news origination source and you’re gonna make more money. And then you have the folks that are actually printing this stuff, Birmingham Times, for example, his quote is that, you know, we got a small staff. It’s hard to cover these studies, the editorials hard. How do we make decisions about it? And the point is this, they’re owned and operated now. All these news sources are owned and operated in Alabama by this company. And there’s not a, there’s no way to break through.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Jeff Bezos is gonna look like an idiot paying billions for the Washington Post when he could have just started his own little website and accomplished the same thing. But it does worry me with all these journalists that are getting laid off. They need jobs. And some of them they’re gonna say, listen, I know it’s horrible, but I gotta go work for Alabama Power News because I’ve got nothing else. That’s what’s so scary is if they get legitimate journalists to start putting their names on stuff, it’s all over.
Mike Papantonio: Question is how many legitimate journalists are around? This again, this is the kind of thing you read, this is in Guardian, but this is what you read in maybe The Lever or the Guardian or where they still have investigative journalists. I mean, it’s still a real journalism entity. In the United States everything from CNBC to CNN, to MSNBC, these aren’t journalism organizations. They don’t have, all they do, they’re talking heads. If you wanna move into the journalism business, just practice in front of a camera. Can you read a teleprompter? Can you show up to work on time and read a teleprompter? Because it’s all gonna be spoon fed to you anyway by management. That’s what’s happened both to CNN and MSNBC and Fox, you know, these are places where they show up at work and they say, this is the angle we want to take today. We want to go after this politician. We want to talk about this issue. And this is what you must talk to. I remember when I did, Ed Schultz used to have me on his show often, and I remember when we started talking about TPP and management came unglued, man. They came unglued because it tied into Hillary Clinton being a bad candidate, tied into TPP being a threat to American workers.
Farron Cousins: Comcast, who was buying them at the time.
Mike Papantonio: Exactly. Comcast didn’t like it.
Farron Cousins: Ed, just so everybody knows, Ed was down here in Pensacola having this conversation with us in person. These are real things.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. This is really happening to me. I can’t tell a story. And the talking heads that will go along with it, you know, here, Joe, how about reading this? Read the teleprompter. We’ll worry about what you’re gonna say. That’s not journalism. There’s no investigation into it. There’s not even a deep understanding of the story most of the time.