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The left-wing spin outfit Media Matters is attempting to undercut an op-ed published today in the Wall Street Journal written by the National Center’s Jeff Stier and food writer Julie Kelly.
You can read the Wall Street Journal piece here.
In the interest of accuracy:
- Media Matters’ sub-headline reads: “Co-Author Works For Fossil Fuel-Funded National Center for Public Policy Research.” Putting that in the present tense is spin. Media Matters has no idea if we are presently receiving funding from the fossil fuel industry. One reason it does not know if that it did not bother to ask. In fact, we have not received any such funding in years.
Media Matters adds that Donors Trust is “receives large donations from groups connected to the oil billionaire Koch brothers.” This is just an extraneous effort to connect us to the Koch Brothers without any information actually connecting us to the Koch Brothers. What this says in plain English is that Media Matters believes groups with board members it links to the Koch brothers or Koch organizations, and allegedly the Charles G. Koch Foundation itself, have accounts at Donors Trust or used to (accounts made within are not “donations,” by the way; the donations are the gifts made by those accounts to qualified charities). That’s all. This says nothing about what donations and to whom have been made from those accounts, if any (donors can leave the funds in the accounts at their discretion). Media Matters has no information that we are receiving Koch funding, and has ignored previously-published information that we aren’t, yet wanted to trick the lemmings into thinking that we are without actually saying so.
In fact, Media Matters has never asked us about the funds we get from Donors Trust or anything else about our funding. Most of the funds we get from Donors Trust are from accounts of the estates of deceased individuals — individuals who were not affiliated in their lifetimes with the fossil fuel industry. Zero Donors Trust donations to us have come from corporations in any industry or fossil fuel interests, and we are happy to state right now for the record that none have come from ExxonMobil or affiliated foundations or from the Koch brothers as individuals or their affiliated organizations/corporations (even though we’d be perfectly happy if they did, as we like the Koch Brothers, and we are ExxonMobil shareholders and customers, for Pete’s sake). So I guess our Donors Trust “dark money” is dark no longer — but will Media Matters acknowledge this?
“Millions of Catholics live in parts of the world which are very vulnerable,” noted Cohen. “What we really don’t want to do, I think, is impose policies that would deny these people access to electricity or make their access to electricity more difficult. That’s where I think the Pope has to be very very careful here, because if he favors policies that will ultimately put some of the good things about the modern life out of the reach of the most vulnerable, he will ultimately wind up perpetuating poverty and putting himself behind policies that will lead to shorter life expectancies, and that’s not something I think any of us want.”
Seriously, Media Matters disagrees with this? How?
Here’s what one writer, Tim Worstall, who got what we were up to (unlike many obtuse ones), wrote at the time about our effort to get Tim Cook to be straightforward:
Therefore, when Cook is asked by some activist [the National Center's Justin Danhof] why he’s wasting money on greenery and not running the company purely for profit Cook cannot tell him the truth. That the company is being run for profit as it only does that amount of greenery that improves the profit margin and it most certainly doesn’t do anything that actually costs. For that would be to defeat the objective of doing the little that is being done.
Yep. So Tim Cook changed the subject to making technology accessible to the blind (not a green issue), lost his temper or pretended to, and fooled those who chose to be fooled, which apparently includes Media Matters. Not us, though.
The Media Matters page does not include an email address for contacting the writer of the piece, Denise Robbins, which is a way to avoid complaints, I suppose. It does include her Twitter address. I noticed with amusement that one of her most recent tweets, posted today, criticizes another party for misspelling a person’s name. If only Media Matters errors were so innocent!