While we continue to struggle with the fight against fake news, some hope arrived Monday: the AP reports that schools have started teaching classes on fake news, as a new sort of Civics 101. Since there’s no sign of the fake news phenomenon letting up anytime soon, it does seem kids need to know how to identify sketchy sites and understand how nonsense is disseminated through the internet.
Case in point: Climate Depot has a post all in favor of repealing the Energy Star program. The post, confusingly, has three bylines: the first credits Marc Morano (who runs Depot), then Jeff Dunetz, then finally sources the material to a guest post by Connor Coughlin. So the claims made by Coughlin, which includes what will hopefully be 2017’s most insane false equivalence, was reposted from his site, to Dunetz’s Lidblog, and then to Climate Depot. At each step, skepticism should rise.
For those that don’t know, the EPA’s Energy Star program is a voluntary program companies can participate in to provide consumers with information and validation that their appliances don’t waste energy. It’s not exactly controversial. Even for our jaded and cynical eyes, it’s appalling to see Coughlin compare the program to one of the most reprehensible and racist activities ever undertaken by the US government: “ENERGY STAR is arguably the most corrupt scientific research program since the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment conducted on unsuspecting citizens from 1932 to 1972.”
You’re reading that correctly. As part of his apparent vendetta against energy efficiency, Coughlin suggests companies who provide the public with information about their product’s energy consumption are on par with the deliberate, undisclosed and untreated infection of hundreds of black men with syphilis over the course of forty years.
As a new name we didn’t recognize, we wondered who exactly Coughlin is, and where does he publish this ghoulish claim? The original post was on n4mation.org, which describes itself as “the brainchild of a small group of people that believe in the open and free flow of information.”
But they’re not exactly open and free with their own origin or funding sources. . Looking up the info for the website, we see it’s registered to Coughlin, through a Colorado P.O. box. That info, plugged into the trusty ol’ Google, directed our attention to Connor Coughlin Consulting. Though the group doesn’t disclose its clients on its rather threadbare site, it offers political lobbying, white papers, and speaking and consulting services, with focuses on energy and environmental policy.
Funny how n4mation’s belief in open and free information doesn’t include being open about its ties to a consultancy that brags that they are “pioneers in the alternative political space.”
One can only wonder what alternative political space they must be pioneering, to make such a sickening comparison. Hopefully even school children who haven’t taken Fake News 101 will see through the alternative facts of this alternative political space.
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