By Jill Fitzsimmons in a Media Matters cross-post
The coverage surrounding Solyndra, the solar panel manufacturer that declared bankruptcy after receiving a $535 million federal loan guarantee, has been sloppy on the part of both mainstream and conservative media outlets. It has also been remarkably abundant.
Between August 31, when Solyndra suspended operations, and September 23, six major print outlets discussed the story in 89 items (news and opinion). Broadcast and cable TV networks discussed Solyndra more than 190 times, totaling over 10 hours of coverage — 8 hours of which occurred on the Fox News Channel.
To put the volume of Solyndra coverage into context, we examined how much attention major print and TV news outlets gave to 1) an obvious case of government corruption exposed in 2008 at the Minerals Management Service (MMS), and 2) a report exposing much greater loss of taxpayer dollars through military contracting waste and fraud. The charts in this post capture our results:
The data for ABC, CBS and NBC are shown by minutes of airtime:
The data for Fox News, CNN and MSNBC are shown by hours of airtime.
On September 10, 2008, the inspector general of the Interior Department delivered three reports documenting wide scale ethics abuses at the Minerals Management Service, the agency tasked with oversight of offshore drilling. The reports found that MMS employees had accepted valuable gifts from oil representatives and had rigged the contracting process to favor friends. The reports also described a “culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” within the MMS and uncovered illegal behavior by employees “wholly lacking in acceptance of or adherence to government ethical standards.”
In the month after the story broke, it was discussed in 20 items in the major print outlets, and TV outlets spent a total of 28 minutes covering the investigation. This amounts to less than one fourth of Solyndra’s print coverage, and less than one fifth the television coverage, when excluding Fox News, which significantly skews the average.
The numbers are equally striking when comparing the onslaught of coverage surrounding the Solyndra controversy to coverage of the revelation that $31-60 billion has been lost to waste and fraud through contracts related to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. That loss represents 15 to 30 percent of total U.S. contract spending. The congressionally-mandated report by the Commission on Wartime Contracting concluded that the government is “still unable to provide effective management and oversight of contract spending that will have exceeded $206 billion by the end of September.”
The report, which was released the same day Solyndra shut down operations, prompted 11 news articles and less than an hour of television coverage between August 28 and September 23, despite costing the taxpayers as least 56 times more than Solyndra, assuming the government recovers nothing from the bankruptcy proceedings. (Keep in mind that Congress set aside $2.4 billion for the cost of defaults across the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee portfolio and Solyndra is the only project to fail so far.)
Every major news outlet included in this analysis has devoted more coverage to Solyndra than to the report of war contract waste and the MMS scandal combined.
But some disparities prove more glaring than others. Fox News stands out for its incessant coverage of the Solyndra saga, which amounts to more than 8 hours of airtime — almost three times that of CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC and CBS combined. Fox has devoted 140 times more airtime to Solyndra than it spent on the MMS scandal, and around 29 times more than it spent on the wartime contracting commission’s report.
– Shauna Theel and Jocelyn Fong contributed to this analysis.
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Could it be that the closing of that solar panel company is the reason that spending on dirty consumer goods to supply electricity is not truly discrescionary? Meaning that they had not already installed solar panels and so could not just decide to turn on the solar electric today.
It nice that they don’t like solar electric as the theft problem of solar panels is already an issue.
Thanks.
Then there is the saying that discression is the better part of valor, but for there to be discression there must exist the choise. Of course, there have been many studies that show that people may act only out of habit, that valor wasn’t there at first when they found that the lights weren’t working. It’s to their benefit that the lights could be turned back on, and with solar elec. Running the air conditioner during the heat of the day, discression once again had the better say.
No surprise here. You are talking of a amoral propaganda system, not an apparatus for disseminating information fairly and rationally. The greatest handicap to saving humanity is the moral insanity of our masters and their propaganda thugs.
I’m generally in agreement that there’s where the crux of the battle lies.
It’s too huge a battle for climate hawks alone I reckon. More has to be done to team up with other, like-minded and related movements and causes to save us from the domination and propaganda of the elements your referring to.
I look at the Socolow solution wedges (see a post from yesterday by Joe) and think … not gonna happen unless its more holistically addressed, unless the movement to do it is inspiring in many, many different ways to many different types of people connecting to it from different perspectives and priorities.
Horrible grammar errors in that there comment by CW!