Is it still news if it's old? the Michigan media's amnesia on battery boondoggles
If reporters keep allowing politicians to sell failed old ideas as "news" then should we refer to that news as the "olds" ... or is it just plain old propaganda?
Is it still news if it's old? the Michigan media's amnesia on battery boondoggles
If reporters keep allowing politicians to sell failed old ideas as "news" then should we refer to that news as the "olds" ... or is it just plain old propaganda?
MAR 30
“But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one.”
The dictionary says the “news” is the presentation of “new” events. There is no simple antonym. We don’t speak of reading the “olds,” but should probably get into the habit. This week the Michigan media put on a master class clinic in selling the olds as news.
For Bridge Magazine, the headline was “Granholm, Whitmer tout pilot training program for electric auto jobs.” At CBS News it was “Jennifer Granholm visits Michigan, announces new program to increase EV battery workforce.” And the WLNS-TV6 team in Lansing went with“Former Governor, current Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm joins Whitmer, Slotkin, Fain to talk EV batteries.”
“It was hard to miss the campaign-like atmosphere of an event Tuesday in Lansing to launch a workforce development training program for high-tech battery manufacturing,” began the report from Jon King of the left-leaning Michigan Advance.
The news that this was a purely political event was indeed “hard to miss.” But they all missed it, including even King, despite that otherwise accurate opening.
Perhaps it was unintentional, because after that he forgot he was being used as a political prop.
“You can provide incentives for employers to come, but if you are not making sure that you have a workforce that’s trained for those jobs, those future facing jobs, then you will have missed the whole pie in the electric vehicle space,” said Granholm, according to King.
“Literally for too long, we’ve allowed other nations to lead battery manufacturing. No longer. We are going to bring the supply chain of electric vehicle production from batteries to brakes home to Michigan and home to the United States,” said Michigan Gov. Whitmer, according to King.
This is representative of the stenographer journalism coverage of the event by the other media accounts previously mentioned (and doubtlessly most if not all others).
Stenographer journalists give us what the regime wants us to hear. Actual news requires context, and context often means warning us when the news isn’t really “new.”
The following highly relevant information was easy to obtain, let alone just remember, but not provided by the Michigan reporters on last week’s battery trail:
“It is a great day of celebration,” said Granholm, announcing the LG Chem project in July 2010. “I want the President . . . to really feel and know how grateful we are in Michigan for becoming the North American battery capital.”
According to a Washington Post account, the LG Chem Michigan project received $150 million from federal stimulus spending and was “also eligible for more than $175 million in tax relief from the state and local governments through 2025.”
“These technologies are exactly what we envision in our drive to make Michigan the alternative energy capital of North America and the advanced battery capital of the world,” said Granholm of A123 Systems in January 2009. “Michigan is the state that put America on wheels, and this project is a major step to making Michigan the state that helps reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil.”
“It’s a revolution to lead the nation,” said Granholm in August 2009, at an announcement of the Dow Chemical lithium-ion battery partnership with Kokam America.
With then-Vice President Joe Biden in attendance, she chanted the familiar incantation: “We want to become the advanced battery capital of the world.”
Biden predicted the facility would soon produce “the Hemi engine of batteries.”
All three of these highly touted and highly subsidized projects from Granholm’s era as governor of Michigan were a total failure.
The precise punchlines for each joke are summarized in my full report: ‘Bonkers’ About Batteries: The Unauthorized Biography of Jennifer Granholm.
And yet last week none of these “olds” and probably others on the same theme prevented Michigan’s reporters from feeding us quotes such as this as “news” . . .
“The electric vehicle revolution is happening, and the question is, can we take care of all of the pieces to make it successful,” Granholm said, calling the training program part of President Joe Biden’s “holistic strategy” for the looming shift.
Yup, that “looming shift” is coming! And always will be if we can be kept ignorant of its past.
In the film Groundhog Day, TV reporter Phil Connors [played by Bill Murray] famously got forced into repeatedly reliving his “olds” as news.
“Well, what if there is no tomorrow?” he asks, “There wasn't one today.”