Posted on 05/31/2007 9:02:23 AM PDT by raccoonradio
There’s a foul wind blowing off Cape Cod. The clean-energy project known as Cape Wind makes more sense than ever, what with the mess in the Middle East and the earth getting warmer by the minute. But resistance to the proposed wind-farm — which would place 130 windmills in Nantucket Sound and provide up to 75 percent of the Cape’s energy at any given time — proves that it really isn’t easy being green. Since Cape Wind was first proposed in 2001, the project has made plenty of powerful enemies (see the sidebar “Enemies in High Places”), including Ted Kennedy, his nephew Robert, and a host of other wealthy Cape Codders who don’t want their beachfront views blighted or their sailing waters cluttered. (Opponents also cite concern for the local fishing industry and avian and marine habitats.)
Now the ongoing fight over Cape Wind has yielded a media controversy. Following the release of a new book (published on May 7) that paints the project’s opponents in an exceedingly unflattering light, some wind-farm supporters are accusing the Cape and Island stations of WGBH, Boston’s public-broadcasting behemoth, of de facto censorship. Whatever you make of this accusation, it shows just how charged the Cape Wind battle has become — and highlights just how much clout the project’s opponents actually have.
Conspiracy of silence Allegations of a media blackout surrounding Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound (Public Affairs) started with a reading that Wendy Williams, who co-authored the book with Robert Whitcomb, gave at a Cape Cod bookstore, Chatham’s Cabbages and Kings, on May 16.
Before Williams’s appearance, Jack Moye — the husband of the bookstore’s owner and a wind-farm supporter — tried to drum up advance publicity for the event on WCAI, WGBH’s Cape affiliate. (WCAI shares staff and programming with WNAN, the Nantucket station, and WZAI, which serves Martha’s Vineyard; in radio parlance, the latter two stations are “repeaters.”) In early May, Moye says, he mentioned the book and the upcoming reading to Elizabeth White, the reporter in charge of WCAI’s wind-farm coverage: Moye says White told him she was eager to read the book and stopped by the store to pick up an advance copy.
A few days later, Moye says, he hadn’t heard back from White. So he contacted Georgia McDonald, WCAI’s corporate-sales director, thinking that a pledge might help his cause. McDonald subsequently visited the store and discussed Cape Wind with a staffer. According to Moye — who didn’t witness the exchange — McDonald said “one of the people at the station had looked at the book and thought it was too pointed to bear mention. I don’t think she actually used the word ‘biased,’ but that’s what it turned out to be.”
Nothing too remarkable so far. After all, reporters take a pass on stories all the time. Furthermore, Williams and Whitcomb’s book is biased — though it’s also informative and entertaining. Jim Gordon, the man behind the Cape Wind project, is consistently depicted as a visionary underdog, and the lionization of Gordon can be a bit much. In contrast, the project’s opponents — including Kennedy, whose family compound at Hyannisport is the stuff of legend — are cast as a bunch of rich hypocrites who’ve put their own needs ahead of the common good.
That said, a few additional details complicate the picture. Consider:
● One of WGBH’s board members is the brother of a prominent wind-farm opponent. David Koch, whose $12 billion placed him 49th on Forbes’ latest ranking of the world’s billionaires, sits on WGBH’s board of directors. He also helps fund the PBS program Nova, which is produced by WGBH. Meanwhile, Bill Koch — the businessman, Museum of Fine Arts benefactor/exhibitionist, and former America’s Cup winner whose net worth is a mere $1.3 billion — is a leader of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, the major anti-wind-farm group. Bill Koch has reportedly spent more than one million dollars of his own fortune on the anti-wind-farm cause.
● WGBH’s Cape affiliates have a working partnership with the Cape Cod Times, the editorial page of which staunchly opposes Cape Wind. Times editors regularly appear on WCAI to discuss stories in that day’s paper. During Cliff Schechtman’s 10-year tenure as editor, which ended in 2005, several critics (including former Phoenix writer Mark Jurkowitz) accused the Times of allowing its editorial stance to influence its news coverage. In 2005, for example, former Times reporter Jack Coleman wrote that Schechtman “won’t send his reporters anywhere that they might find people who overcame their initial opposition to windmills off their coast.”
Wind-farm supporters agree that the Times’ news coverage has improved since Paul Pronovost replaced Schechtman as editor. But publisher Peter Meyer — who lives in Osterville, Ground Zero for Cape Wind opposition, and does not receive flattering treatment in Cape Wind — still holds the paper’s purse strings.
● WGBH’s Cape affiliates imprudently tried to raise money from the principals in the wind-farm debate. Earlier this year, McDonald, WCAI’s underwriting director, had a conversation with Barbara Hill, the executive director of Clean Power Now, the major pro-wind-farm group. McDonald suggested that Clean Power Now contribute $5000 to WCAI, says Hill; in exchange, information about the organization would appear on a WCAI Web site dedicated to coverage of the Cape Wind issue. She made a similar suggestion to the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound. Both groups declined.
During McDonald’s fundraising pitch, Hill claims, McDonald implied that Clean Power Now receives funding from Cape Wind Associates, the Jim Gordon–led company that’s seeking to build the wind farm. In fact, no such relationship exists. To Hill, this offhand comment suggested a fundamentally flawed understanding of the Cape Wind fight.
● Other Cape institutions seem spooked by the book. Allen Larson of the Cape Cod Center for Sustainability recently obtained permission to use a room in the Cape Cod Museum of National History for a discussion of Cape Wind. The permission was revoked a few hours later, due to a “feeling that the authors are not unbiased.”
Wind empowerment To wind-farm supporters — or at least to a passionate and/or conspiracy-minded few — these details suggest that something nefarious is afoot. On May 19, the online publication Cape Cod Today ran a piece by editor and publisher Walter Brooks — whose single-minded support for the wind farm resembles the Cape Cod Times editorial page’s determined opposition — titled “Media boycott of book causes windstorm of protest.” (Get it?) Brooks also reprinted several letters that Cape-dwelling wind-farm supporters had written to WGBH president Henry Becton; the writers accused WGBH’s Cape stations of bad journalism and warned that they’d be reconsidering their future support for WCAI.
Brooks’s article featured one other flourish worth noting: he reprinted an ad from WBUR, WGBH’s public-radio competitor, which had run that morning in the Boston Globe. The ad depicted a convertible driving through downtown Boston; the proposed Nantucket Sound windmills were pictured on the inside of the car’s windshield. The ad’s bolded catch phrase: EMPOWERING PERSPECTIVES. “Is it a coincidence,” Brooks asked, “or clever marketing?”
According to Steve Young, the broadcast director for WCAI and WGBH’s other Cape affiliates, Brooks’s allegations are completely off base. There is, Young tells the Phoenix, no validity whatsoever to the charge that WGBH’s Cape affiliates are boycotting Cape Wind, or that those stations are in bed with the anti-wind-farm cause.
Yes, both Light and McDonald visited the Chatham bookstore earlier this month, says Young. But in his account, a store employee told McDonald that Cape Wind was biased — not the other way around. The same clerk then erroneously told Moye that McDonald said WCAI wouldn’t be covering the book.
In fact, no such decision has been made, says Young. He’s reading Cape Wind right now; so is Mindy Todd, who hosts a Cape-focused talk show, The Point, weekdays at 9:30 am. So are two commentators for the station — one a wind-farm supporter, one an opponent — who’ll be doing back-to-back reviews of the book. And, he adds, WCAI does not think that Clean Power Now is bankrolled by Gordon’s venture.
“We’re a bit late in the game,” Young admits. “But we’ve got a small staff; we’re a tiny little station. We’ve made no firm decision as to whether we’re going to have the authors on, but I think we probably are. . . . If we finally get the authors on sometime in June or July, nobody’s going to be hurt by it.”
Furthermore, WCAI’s relationship with the Cape Cod Times shouldn’t be taken as a sign that the station agrees with the Times’ Cape Wind editorial stance, says Young, noting that, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, there’s no financial component to the relationship between the station and the paper. “We don’t take any position about Cape Wind,” he insists. “We never have; we never would. . . . We’ve tried to cover this story straight down the middle, all the way from the beginning, and we’re proud of our coverage.”
As for WCAI’s parent organization, Jeanne Hopkins — WGBH’s vice-president for corporate communications — has this to say: “We’ve never had any discussion with David Koch about his views about the wind farm. . . . Certainly, our board members do not have any involvement in editorial decisions.”
Small Capers That might not be enough to convince Barbara Hill, Clean Power Now’s executive director. “They’ve been reluctant to be evenhanded about it,” she says of WCAI’s wind-farm coverage. “If they do a show on [the wind-farm battle], they’ll debate the developer” — i.e., Cape Wind Associates — “against the local opposition group. They will not debate the local opposition group against the local support group, which is far more evenhanded. They seem to be very upset with the idea that there is a strong local group in support of the wind farm, and that’s what appears to be driving their actions.”
Hill’s charges merit a healthy measure of skepticism. For example, if WCAI is, as she puts it, “very upset” that a local citizen’s group backs the Cape Wind proposal, why did the station recently give air time to Chris Stimpson — a Clean Power Now member — to expound on wind power’s glories?
Nearly every claim and counterclaim in this spat raises similar questions. Start with WCAI’s alleged decision to ignore Williams’s reading: since on-air bookstore promos are, by Jack Moye’s own admission, relatively uncommon, is it really that surprising that the station didn’t plug the event on air? Or consider Brooks’s claim of a “boycott”: what about the fact that WCAI carried Cape Wind co-author Williams’s interview with nationally syndicated talk-show host Diane Rhem?
That said, WCAI’s delay in providing any original coverage of Cape Wind does seem weird. (It has already been reviewed by, among others, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, and even the Cape Cod Times.) The book deals with the biggest issue to hit the Cape in decades. You’d think the station would have found a way to squeeze it into the schedule by now.
Even if no conspiracy against Cape Wind exists, you really can’t blame wind-farm supporters for imagining that one might. As the book itself makes clear — with details that transcend its undeniably strong point of view — the political, economic, and cultural clout of Cape Wind’s opponents is remarkable. No, the anti-wind-farm forces probably haven’t kept WCAI from reporting on Cape Wind. But that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t like to.
Making it safe for Teddy to drive his car.
DE-FUND CPB/PBS/NPR
That said, the hypocrisy of greenies is almost overwhelming, witness their resistance to nukes. They don't want clean power, they want NO power.
The Phoenix is a liberal rag,but sometimes they’ll throw in an occasional hit piece on their core audience.
I would think there would be too much turbulence.
They put them on mountains in CA and it doesn't seem to hurt them. Are you talking about turbulance caused by altitude or by the canyons formed by the buildings?
By the canyons formed by the buildings.
Screw the wind farm, let’s drill for oil there!
Cementjungle:
Texaco a few years ago wanted to drill in Connecticut, but CT told them no thanks.
Or just do both.
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