Media outlet refuses to run GOP’s TV ad filled with falsehoods on clean energy bill
Friday, July 3rd, 2009The NY Times takes cash from ExxonMobil to publish its lies on the front page. The Washington Post was on the verge of offering lobbyists off-the-record access to the “powerful few” for $250,000 (!) — until the Politico (and others) called them out. But there still are a few media outlets that won’t sell their integrity for a few pieces of silver, as this Think Progress post explains.
Yesterday afternoon, Roanoke television station WDBJ-TV, announced they will be refusing to air a National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) ad attacking freshman Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA), citing factual inaccuracies. The NRCC had been planning to run television ads against Democratic members of Congress, like Perriello, who voted for the Waxman-Markey clean energy economy legislation that passed last week. After receiving information about the factual inaccuracies in the ad, the station pulled it from rotation.
For any objective observer, the the ad is pulled out of thin air. The ads erroneously state that the bill will “destroy jobs” and “cost middle-class families $1,800 a year.” According to a study by the Center for American Progress, clean energy economy legislation will create 1.7 million American jobs while simultaneously addressing climate change by capping carbon dioxide emissions. The $1,800 figure used by NRCC is also made of whole cloth. The Congressional Budget Office has scored the bill and found that by 2020, the annual cost would be about $175 per household — about a postage stamp a day. An EPA estimate of the bill found similar results, projecting the cost to be about $80 to $111 per a year.
Still refusing to accept reality, the Republican leadership is instructing its members to lie about the clean energy economy bill:

The U.S. House of representatives is debating landmark climate and clean energy legislation now — starting with the debate on the rule which limits total debate on Waxman-Markey bill to 3 hours, which means we should get a final vote by the end of the day.
Over the next of several hours, you can watch this debate on C-SPAN (with various interruptions). But one can hardly find any discussion of this most consequential legislation in the status quo media. Even before the death of two pop icons, the coverage was very sparse.




