Late last week, newspapers across the country owned by GateHouse Media linked to In The Shadow of Wind Farms, a long-form article critical of wind farms, while pro-wind organizations and climate action media pushed back.
In Minnesota, GateHouse Media owned papers with an online presence--the Crookston Times, the Granite Falls Advocate Tribune, the Montevideo News, the Redwood Falls Gazette, the Sleepy Eye Herald-Dispatch, and the St. James Plaindealer--posted links to Living in a wind farm: Communities divided over pursuit of clean energy, its incentives between December 15 and 16.
Read the piece at the link. One Minnesota Republican lawmaker, freshman state senator and Minnesota Senate Energy and Utilities Finance and Policy Committee Vice Chair Andrew Mathews, R-Milaca, is cited in the report:
A Minnesota lawmaker recently criticized the industry for dismissing wind farm residents’ concerns, saying it hurts its own credibility.
“What’s frustrating to me is when we take the taxpayer money and use it for these projects and then turn around to the taxpayer and completely blow off their concerns,” said Republican state Sen. Andrew Mathews at an October legislative hearing [Legislative Energy Commission's October October 19 meeting] on wind turbine siting. [minutes here; the commission's audio here].
To hear the industry say “it’s all bias and not based on facts or science and it’s fear and annoyance and rumors, I have tough time then trying to decide how much to consider is credible” from these companies.
Mathews wants the industry to work on solutions to these problems instead of denying they exist. He said it’s time the state and its regulatory agencies do more to protect residents from harm.
Mathews isn't the chief author or co-author of any legislation to do this, but there's still time come February.
Pushback
DeSmog Blog was quick to follow-up on the report with Brendan DeMille's In the Shadow of Honest Journalism: GateHouse Media Publishes Atrocious Anti-Wind Article Devoid of Scientific Evidence:
This week, Gatehouse Media published a long-form investigative report called “In the Shadow of Wind Farms” claiming that wind energy has caused negative health effects for residents living near wind turbines — a claim that flies in the face of actual science.
GateHouse Media’s anti-wind article leans almost entirely on anecdotal evidence compiled during its six-month long project that included interviews with dozens of people who claim negative outcomes from living near wind farms.
Meanwhile, in the realm of scientific facts, the American Wind Energy Association, the main trade group representing the wind power industry, points to 25 scientific reviews that document the safety of wind farms for human health and the environment. One health researcher has told DeSmog the GateHouse article was “simply irresponsible journalism” and actually had “potential to exacerbate the experience of anxiety and related health effects.”
Although GateHouse, a syndication outfit that publishes 130 daily newspapers in 36 states, briefly mentions the fact that scientific evidence for these claims is nearly non-existent, it plows ahead with a lengthy article full of anecdotes and unsubstantiated claims that aren’t supported by real science.
How this piece got published in its horribly one-sided (anti-wind) approach is a question worthy of many letters to the editor. Whether GateHouse — which is notoriously quiet when asked questions by other media outlets about its operations — will answer or attempt to defend this attack piece, time will tell.
But there is no hiding that the anti-wind movement is clearly coordinated, which even GateHouse admits its reporters were told repeatedly by sources contacted for their piece.
“Many of the people who do complain, several representatives said, are well-known among industry insiders and comprise a small but vocal group of anti-wind activists,” the article said.
“There are a good number of people who seem to pop up in different states and fight any wind project they can find,” Dave Anderson of the Energy and Policy Institute, a pro-renewable energy watchdog group, told GateHouse.
But the GateHouse reporters failed to disclose important information about several of their sources, including some with extensive ties to highly coordinated anti-wind activism.
Brad Tupi is identified only as “a Pittsburgh attorney who has litigated several wind-related suits.”
Tupi participated in a 2012 meeting between anti-wind activists and representatives from fossil fuel funded groups, including Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and E&E Legal, Paul Driessen of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), John Droz of the American Tradition Institute (now E&E Legal Institute), Todd Wynn of the American Legislative Exchange Council, and Marita Noon of the Heartland Institute.
The Guardian exposed this 2012 meeting and a related anti-wind “National PR Campaign Proposal” which was written by John Droz, the anti-wind activist who now runs a group called the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions which also takes aim at wind power.
Droz’s “National PR Campaign Proposal,” which he prepared while still serving as a fellow at the American Tradition Institute (now called E&E Legal), called for the creation of a national PR campaign focused on the “subversion in message of [wind] industry so that it effectively becomes so bad that no one wants to admit in public they are for it.”
Other elements of the PR campaign that Droz proposed include:
“A) Cause the targeted audience to change its opinion and action based on the messages. B) Provide credible counter message to the (wind) industry. C) Disrupt industry message with countermeasures. D) Cause subversion in message of (wind) industry so that it effectively becomes so bad no one wants to admit in public they are for it (much like wind has done to coal, by turning green to black and clean to dirty). Ultimate Goal: Change policy direction based on the message.
Most of this could be done by volunteers without having a formal national organization. Discuss how this would work and who would have what responsibilities. Consider joining forces w some already established organization where there is substantial commonality and commitment (e.g. ATI, Heartland, IER, CEI, Marshall, Brookings, Cato, Manhattan, AfP, FW, CFACT, ALEC, NA-PAW, etc.)”
After the 2012 meeting was reported on publicly, Tupi was quoted saying:
“I would plead guilty to participating in a meeting of concerned citizens opposed to wasteful, unproven, inefficient wind energy. I would agree that we are interested in coordinating with other reputable organizations, and I personally would be honored to work with Heartland Institute and others.”
This was around the same time that the Heartland Institute made headlines for its extremely offensive billboard likening those who believe in climate science to the Unabomber.
Cary Shineldecker is a central character in GateHouse Media’s story, and has also been cited on a number of occasions in the anti-wind musings of Michigan Capitol Confidential, which is published by the Koch-backed Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
Shineldecker has also worked closely with Kevon Martis of the Interstate Informed Citizens Coalition, another participant in the 2012 Koch/anti-wind meeting in DC. Martis joined the Koch/coal-backed Energy & Environmental Legal Institute as a fellow in 2016. . . .
Read the rest at DeSmog Blog. In a fact check on the America Wind Energy Association's Into the Wind blog, Greg Alvarez wrote in Slanted GateHouse Media story omits most people’s experience of life near wind farms:
. . . Context matters. And that’s exactly what is lacking in a recent report by GateHouse Media (In the Shadow of Wind Farms) that amplifies the complaints of a small number of the millions of Americans living near wind farms, while downplaying the vast majority who welcome the benefits of a new cash crop for rural America.
GateHouse appears to have set out to write a negative story about wind energy. First their reporter probed the idea that foreign companies were buying up American cropland. (They aren’t. Farmers keep their land and get lease income.) GateHouse then was fed anecdotal reports by opponents of wind farms online, while declining multiple offers to interview people satisfied with their local wind farm.
For nearly six months, both AWEA and wind developers responded to pointed questions and offered much-needed context to the GateHouse reporters. When offered positive accounts of wind farms in rural America, however, we were told they wouldn’t be included because the story of positive experiences had already been written.
The result, according to a watchdog group’s in-depth look at the origins of the GateHouse project: Its “anti-wind article leans almost entirely on anecdotal evidence” that “flies in the face of actual science.”
It paints a deeply inaccurate picture of wind power in America, based on a cherry-picked sampling of unhappy individuals. And it perpetuates baseless claims, in most cases without offering any evidence, which is as bad or worse of a journalistic practice than selectivity.
Vast majority of wind neighbors report positive experiences
As with other large-scale infrastructure projects, residents living near wind farms will have a variety of experiences. Undoubtedly, there are some people who do not like living near wind turbines. We are sympathetic to those individuals. AWEA and its member companies strive to ensure that wind farms are good neighbors, while leaseholders and communities around wind projects have the best possible experience.
But the context is that the vast majority of people living near wind farms report positive experiences. In the U.S., 20 million people live in counties with wind turbines. Around the world, tens of millions more live near wind turbines without issue. Once wind farms are built, as shown by polls taken recently in states such as Texas and Iowa where wind turbines have been widely adopted, concerns tend to diminish and support for building more of them has increased to 85%, 90% or even higher.
However, GateHouse refused to speak with people willing to tell their positive stories about living near wind farms.
For example, we recommended that their reporters connect with Paul Jackson, Director of Economic Development for Benton County, Indiana. Benton County is home to nearly 600 wind turbines, and the community is overwhelmingly supportive, yet Gatehouse declined to speak with Paul. . . .
Who owns GateHouse? That's complicated. Mostly, it seems to be a private equity firm buying up newspaper chains and vacuuming out profits. Check out NeimanLab's Newsonomics: Softbank, Fortress, Trump – and the real story of Gatehouse’s boundless ambitions from earlier this year. Ken Doctor asks:
It’s dailies like GateHouse’s — most of them in smaller cities of the country — that now demand new scrutiny out of this election. What do voting Americans know? What do they think they know? How much are their once-robust newspapers, especially across the kinds of heartlands that New Media serves, helping them separate fact from fiction?
Good question for the national wind energy story.
Photo: Wind power. Via MN DEED.
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