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PR, Nuclear Power, Weapons and Millions of $ Comment by Larry Ross, March 17, 2007
This article shows how the nuclear power industry is spending millions on public relations to revise the image of nuclear power from something dangerous, not to be touched, to something clean, green and desirable. The way the PR companies, and the media, use the industry's ex-Greenpeace spokesman - and will not reveal what they pay him - is most instructive. The comments following the original version are excellent and contain many provoking pros and cons of the debate. Serious nuclear power researchers should read these, and develop counter arguments, if they wish to be able to answer the pro-nuclear lobbyists. The Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Use Lobby The pro-nuclear weapons lobby, and nuclear weapons use lobby, which includes the Bush Administration with their unlimited resources is also doing PR work to change the image of nuclear weapons and their use from cataclysmic, and much too dangerous to ever consider using except as a suicidal retaliation to an attack. They are presenting nuclear weapons as useable weapons that don't cause many civilian casualties - even friendly devices 'that save our troops lives'. The campaign to humanise nuclear weapons and make them user friendly is presented as a perfectly normal and natural military development. This has been very artfully done by the media. The media carefully avoids mentioning the horrific consequences such as enormous casualties, widespread and long-term radiation poisoning and dangers of escalation. Built-in to the media and PR presentations, is the assumed sacred right of the President of the United States to use such weapons and be above any criticism or doubts. The media's treatment of George Bush on the nuclear issue, war decisions and the like, is like regarding "HIM" as a totally wise omnipotent being, well above the law, who can never be questioned or doubted. The media is reflecting and spreading the message that we should all accept the Bush dictatorship and not question. If a few of us do question it, the media will not publish it. In so doing they present the picture of a totally obedient, passive public with no questions or objections. Unfortunately people get sucked into accepting these expressed, and unexpressed, assumptions and attitudes. The question many people might ask is how the Bush Administration has managed to subvert the media so easily. The answer I think for the huge media corporations and their editors is 'P-R-O-F-I-T '. It is just not profitable to oppose a deceitful group of men who have taken over the US invented a series of lies and wars based on lies, and are well on their way to establishing a de-facto dictatorship in the US Profit, not real news, is their 'raison d'etre' and their driving passion.. Important news and investigative journalism does not get published if touches on sensitive issues the Bush Administration wants kept secret, especially if it exposes some of the most important lies and frauds of the Bush Administration. This approach by the PR-media to the nuclear weapons and use issue has been generally accepted by the public. There has been little or no public awareness, or protest that Congress has legalised George Bush's power to wage pre-emptive nuclear war against any nation based on just about any excuse. Similarly, there is hardly any public awareness that under Bush, nuclear weapons may be introduced into a conventional or non-nuclear conflict and that somehow, the US has the divine right to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear nations. The consequences of these doctrines, if applied, could usher in the biggest disaster in history. But the media and PR firms have managed to present this issue as a 'ho-hum' issue a 'what else is new' issue, or a non-issue they don't even mention. The nuclear power lobby, with their virtually unlimited resources added to the unlimited financial and human resources of the nuclear weapons lobby and a co-operative unprincipled media, have so far won the contest. In comparison, the few whistleblowers and anti-nuclear campaigners and organisations are drowned out. The information media is stacked against them and ensures that few are published. What they can do is severely affected by lack of financial and human resources. If most of the public don't know, and prefer not to know about how very dangerous Bush lies, wars and policies are, and how appalled and concerned they should be, what can whistleblowers do? The lesson however unpalatable it may be, and against our traditions and beliefs, is that good does not always triumph in the end. Sometimes evil, if backed by unlimited power, wealth and influence can triumph in the end even if it is the end of humanity. The vital factor that people don't yet grasp, is that our weapons technology has allowed evil, even the stupidly evil, to triumph totally and end the human experiment. After Bush has brought on a nuclear apocalypse, or it just happens as a result of US policies, there are no second chances.
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How Reporters Learned to Stop Worrying By Diane Farsetta, Center for Media and Democracy, March 16, 2007 "We just find it maddening that Hill & Knowlton , which has an $8 million account with the nuclear industry, should have such an easy time working the press," concluded the Columbia Journalism Review in an editorial in its July / August 2006 issue. The magazine was rightly bemoaning the tendency of news outlets to present former Greenpeace activist Patrick Moore and former EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman as environmentalists who support nuclear power, without noting that both are paid spokespeople for a group bankrolled by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI). NEI represents nuclear power plant operators, plant designers, fuel suppliers and other sectors of the nuclear power industry. Hill & Knowlton is NEI's public relations firm, though it's not the only firm working to build support for nuclear power. Thanks in part to an ongoing, multifaceted PR push -- along with very real concerns about energy prices, rising energy demand, aging infrastructure, sustainability and global warming -- nuclear power is attracting serious attention from reporters and policymakers alike. The question is whether a vital public debate over energy choices is being skewed by deep-pocketed interests with a dog in the fight. The dangers of such distortions are especially acute at the state and local levels. That's where efforts to extend the licenses of existing nuclear power plants, to maintain or expand nuclear waste storage facilities, and to site new proposed nuclear power plants, are made or broken. And that's where pro-nuclear campaigners appear to be focusing, adopting the mantle and tactics of community groups while steadfastly refusing to provide details on their operations. Persistence Pays Off |
