|
News & Analysis | REG•WATCH Blog | Press Room
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Industry-Backed Lobbyists Use YouTube to Attack Climate Change
Lobbyists are trying some new media tactics to sway public opinion about climate change. In the latest effort, a video released on the video-sharing site YouTube mocks Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. The short, entitled "Al Gore's Penguin Army," is a vapid animation that turns Gore into a fat penguin who bores audiences to death and hypnotizes them into thinking climate change must be stopped. The end lists things you can do to stop global warming including "stop exhaling" and "become a vegetarian." The video also tries to make climate change a partisan issue by showing a "red state" movie theater with a packed audience for X-Men 3 and an empty theater for An Inconvenient Truth.
The filmmaker listed on the site was a 29-year-old from Beverly Hills. Fortunately, a savvy reporter for the Wall Street Journal (subscription-only) checked the IP address of the film's creator following an email conversation and found that the email actually originated from inside DCI Group, a Washington DC public relations group who represents big business, including Exxon Mobile.
Did big oil really think we were that naïve? Tsk. Tsk.
More here.
Posted by Genevieve Smith
|