Tux sucks wind, once more.

Nothing but the revealed truth for Portland Press Herald's Tux Turkel,when it comes to the reworked plan by ex governor Angus King to plaster yet another scenic Maine mountain ridge with what will certainly be  poorly producing, subsidy-dependent  eyesores.

In his article Builder reduces impact of Highland Wind plan.   Tux swallows the King's public relations noise as glibly as a raw oyster, and pronounces it Good:
"The developer of a controversial wind farm proposed for Somerset County has redesigned the project to benefit residents and reduce visual impacts on the Appalachian Trail and the Bigelow Preserve."

Note he didn't write: "The developer of a controversial wind farm proposed for Somerset County SAYS THAT HE has redesigned the project to benefit residents and reduce visual impacts on the Appalachian Trail and the Bigelow Preserve."

Nope. If it comes from the King, it's gotta be so, in Turkel's star-struck eyes.

Lynda Clancy shows 'em how to write.

I really liked Lynda's Herald Gazette article "Warren blasts CRC health, methadone culture" 

Unlike some reportage  from that occasionally fine newspaper, here Clancy effortlessly draws together milieu, storyline, meeting participants, backstory, the conflicting sociologies and economics of this event, in which a California based company held a public meeting on its proposal to place a methadone clinic in the tiny Midcoast Maine town of Warren

The simple lines that won my heart was when she wrote:  Still another person shouted, "Let him talk! Let the man finish." 

Documenting that tempering voice in the midst of jeers and uproar revealed to readers the essential civic decency of the wrathful  townfolk, even in the midst of this highly charged event, where angry town residents in the packed gymnasium are not only rejecting the proposal, but also signing petitions calling for the ouster of town manager and code officer. 

It was like a written version of  Norman Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech" painting, something I recently had the pleasure of lingering over in its original form. 


Great work, Lynda. Something that the town ought to keep in its archive. 

(But then I'm an amateur historian, and loathe the general run of  low-information and frequently critically deficient coverage of locally important events that all too many other journalists are, alas, prone to produce.)

Village Shlep: why won't Herald Gazette reporter Auciello cover both sides of the local windpower stories?

Sometimes you just have to gnash your teeth over the  determination of local commercial media workers to avoid rocking the boat of Commerce.  Take Village Soup's Herald Gazette reporter Shlomit Auciello.

Please.  

Joking aside, Auciellot reports on windmill stories for the Herald Gazette, which covers Knox County, Maine, from coastal  Camden to Port Clyde on Penobscot Bay's shores, and inland to the town of Washington and the upper Saint George River Valley.
     
Unfortunately, as her stories reveal, she is demonstrably content to be stenographer to industry, uncritically reprinting every oneliner the industry can feed her, while brazenly editing out dissenting opinions and inconvenient truths from her windpower stories. 
     
Consider her latest story on the topic Camden Select Board reviews wind proposals... -a story which doesn't even mention the word " windmill", and scrubbed  out the fact that windfarm promoter George Baker's claim, of having already met with "a bunch of regulators" about his plans for Ragged Mountain, turns out, on questioning, to have been an informal meeting with a single former member of the Maine Public Utility Commission.    It was not newsworthy to her  that Baker had boldly knowingly lied to the people of Camden and their duly elected representatives at the meeting, which aired on community cable too. Nor of course, were the convolutions Baker went through to avoid answering the Big Question. 


All Camdenites were no doubt eager to learn how many windmills  the Island Institute and the investors squatting behind them have in mind.  But neither such fundamental information, nor even coverage of George Baker's see-no-evil antics in keeping this vague was to be found in her reportage. 
     
Or Shlomit Auciello's immortal May 12, 2010 piece: Camden Hills windplanners gain approval for on-campus turbine which can be summarized again as uncritical stenography of what one source calls  "a carpetbagging Massachusetts firm" using public relations spin on credulous journalists, to gets high school students to squeeze their parents for $500,000 dollars to buy and operate a wind turbine. Where? In the midst of a owl- and other bird-rich coastal forest area. A windmill that, both the manufacturer and  the University of Massachusetts professorial windpower shill George Baker admit, probably won't perform worth a hoot.  But for Aucello, evidently, that nature stuff,  and the admitted uselessness of the community's investment, is not news worth informing her readers of.


Those two tales follow the same wind industry uber alles line as Auciello's two windpower-related stories from  earlier this year:


March 10, 2010  Sharing the bottom: Maine Fishermen's Forum looks at wind energy
Again Shlomit  Auciello excises her Krhuschev-like magic eraser to blot out  the chief participants in this story of a presentation at this annual gathering of lobstermen, groundfishers and other commercial fishermen  of a state plan to begin leasing state waters to the wind industry.  Despite there being a furious roomful of fishfolk disputing this pronouncement, Auciello quotes only from the wind industry and its governmental supporters. 


"Prepare to share" Maine  marine resources Comissioner George Lapointe told the assembled.  But true to form, Herald Gazette reporter Shlomit Auciello was prepared to share only industry and government's point of view with her listeners, not that of the fishermen - whose Forum this gathering was, after all!

February 18, 2010 Monhegan islanders hear more about wind study plans

  "Approximately 25 people attended a meeting on Monhegan Island Feb. 16 to learn more about plans for a deepwater wind energy testing site to be located about 2.5 miles off the island's shore."  Were there dissenters at the meeting?  Yes. Did she cover that fact? No!  Is there a lawsuit in Maine Superior Court about the very recently approved plan being touted at the meeting? Yes!  Did Auciello know? Yes. Does she mention it in her coverage? No!  

What is one to do in the face of this sort of censorship?  Thanks to all the social media, from blogs to twitter and everything in between, one can get information directly to persons or demographics of interest.   

    

But the proud imprimatur of unbiased  professional journalism, that  has long been stamped on Maine's print media, is vanishing as Auciello and others like her reflexively use the delete button on dissenting points of view in their copy.

Maine media sellouts on Windpower: the worst and the dumbest

Top down winner has always been the Working Waterfront tabloid emanating from the Island Institute. Now that the Island Institute and some of its board members are deep into the financial trough of corporate welfare that the federal government is doling out in great dollops to the wind extraction industry, it is no longer so caring about the feisty Maine islanders that  the 'Tute has long made its bread and butter on.  Under the bus the islanders go, along with all windsprawl malcontents.

The Portland Press Herald is next. Tux Turkel  & Ethan Wilensky-Lanford  will NOT mention any opposition to ocean wind farming. Fishermen? What? Maine has fishermen? They don't want windfarms? Yawn. Sorry, Tux et al can't cover that point of view; doesn't fit the spin from corporate welfare types  that all windmilling is good windmilling  


The PPH an d its satellite Kennebeck Journal  will also stupidly persist in writing that the bill is about "nearshore" windmilling, when it is most assuredly about "offshore" windmillery.

There are many other examples of witless windhuggery among the members of Maine's 4th estate.  Someone's gotta educate the news scibblers.

Stay tuned.

Maine first state to ban ocean windfarming. Media yawns.

Sometimes reporters just don't grasp the big picture. Not surprising, as beleaguered journalists  find themselves covering ever more stories per day, and  with time enough only to assemble enough facts and a hook to fill a news hole, then off to the next. But this story seemed extraordinary. A case of not seeing  the forest for all the trees. First the backstory:

On March 24, 2010 By unanimous vote, the Maine Legislature's Utilities and Energy Committee sent a final version of LD 1810."An Act To Implement the Recommendations of the Governor's Ocean Energy Task Force", to the floor where it is expected to pass without difficulty and be signed by Governor Baldacci.

The bill  prohibits windfarming in state waters and directs would-be ocean windmill investors to join in an effort to build  floating offshore wind turbines in Maine and then tow them ten miles and further from shore for deployment in federal and EEZ waters.  

The decision to refrain from windfarming in state waters came after intense opposition from lobsterimen, groundfishermen, scallopers and shrimpers, objecting to the threatened  leasing away of their irreplaceable commercial fishing grounds  to absentee power utilities.

The bill also proposes  that the state market deep offshore wind as a special kind of "green ocean energy" that doesn't harm scenery and property values like  land-based wind farms do in Maine. 

The writer for the Kennebec Journal & Portland Press Herald, E

than Wilensky-Lanford,

 

made only the barest passing reference to the former and focused instead on the latter: the state wanting to persuade Maine business and academia to buy higher priced power that the offshore wind farm would generate  

The rather astonishing victory by fishermen, windjammers and other coastal interests in preventing  the closing of the state's marine commons is almost dismissed by

 Wilensky-Lanford's article. In hi article  Panel backs near-shore wind, tide power bill 

 he  wrote: "The bill set short-term goals of developing near-shore wind power, but now is more focused on deep-water projects.

"

Such understatement! the reader cannot tell from this article that there will be no windfarming in Maine state waters,. Can they?  

Tut tut, Ethan.

Tux sux once again - completely misses the big story

Get this: There was a legislative hearing. Unexpectedly the chair of another committee comes to the hearing and tells the committee to throw out its big bill and do it over. This is echoed by the speaker of the house. Both are impelled by a wave of angry communications from their constituents. 

Tux yawns. 

This concerns of course LD 1810, An Act To Implement the Recommendations of the Governor's Ocean Energy Task Force.   But Tux has been given his marching orders: the story will be about the heating oil industry being ticked about the wheareases that call for phasing out their polluting industry over time.

This is exciting! Tux thinks. Angry oilmen! Easy story! Tux grins. Simple work.

But in the intersest of illuminating what Tux clouded with his witless prose...Here's what happened:

In the 36 hours before the hearing on LD 1810, members, of the Utility and Energy Committee said, they had heard loud and clear from Maine fishermen about their extreme displeasure with the notion of this bill opening up Maine state waters to nearshore commercial windfarms, pushing scallopers shrimpers & groundfishermen out.  

Then  Representative Leila Percy, co-chair of the Marine Resources Committee, lets the Untily and Energy Committee know both that the bill  threatened Maine fishermen and was not acceptable, and that she spoke for Speaker of the House Hannah Pingree (who couldn't be there)  on this as well.

As the TV cameras rolled, and energy lobbyists reeled in dismay,  the Utility and Energy  committee switched from unqualified support for LD 1810, to considering two alternatives: either 

(1) turning LD 1810 into a Resolve, and shipping it round  to other legislative committees and commercial fishing communities next year before taking any action, or 

(2)  removing from the bill all wording related to anything that would facilitate  commercial windfarm operations in Maine state waters.


Uh...Tux?  


Nope. The Tuxter didn't find that newsworthy.   Fishermen are so...old economy.  So passe'.  Turkel instead gapes at the twinkle and shine of the windmills, whose lobbyists glitter with wealth and political connection.  Fishermen be damned.

Under option 2 the bill would continue with sections that give the wind industry tax breaks and immunizes it from a variety of conservation and environmental laws, also known as  "streamlining"  the laws.  "Streamlining? More like amputating the law," one conservation  activist grumped to the committee,  and the room filled with uneasy laughter.

Also remaining in the altered LD 1810  would be a controversial "Welfare Wind" section, This part of the bill forces Mainers to subsidize the wind industry by requiring electricity utilities to purchase wind-generated power for triple what they pay Bangor Hydro and other  electricity providers,  but then allows the utilities  to pass  the increased cost on to Maine consumers.

The oil heating industry also showed up in opposition to LD 1810  In particular, they opposed a section that calls for phasing their industry out of the home and commercial heating business and requiring Maine consumers to use electricity for heating.  

While oil and lobsters don't mix well in nature, in Augusta they may together push LD 1810, and the energy industry behind it, far away from its original goals.  


But for Tux, this would interfere with the official marching orders to glorify the wind industry at all costs.

Village Soup: blowing the wind story. Again.

 In Sharing the bottom: Maine Fishermen's Forum looks at wind energy, Rockland Herald Gazette/VillageSoup reporter Shlomit Auciello has again indulged in her Khruschev-like excision from the picture of some of the chief participants in the story:  This time covering a meeting on a plan to fill state nearshore waters with windmills. The reporter quotes only from the wind industry and its governmental supporters. Where are the fishermen in the story?  There was a furious roomful, I was there, Auciello was there. the fishhermen and their leaders were there. Last time she ignored the chief litigant in the offshore wind plan of the state in her story on University of Maine's offshore wind plan. Lawsuit? What lawsuit?

Why were none of them in her "coverage"?  Apparently the editorial policy of the Herald Gazette and its Village Soup owners is to censor out any dissenters to uncontrolled land-rush windfarm expansion into Maines nearshore and offshore waters.  Existing users be damned, no matter how many centuries they've fished and sailed here. And the fishermen are furious, as Auciello would know by contacting the commercially fishing  members of her local community. She instead, threw the fishing industry under the bus

She giave her readers a false impression of what happened at this imnportant event, what it means for people living on the coast  and who wins and loses with upcoming legislation that would open entire Maine coast to windfarms.

Just another surgical strike on truth, by the Rockland Herald gazette