Alabama Power Giant Launches Pro News Propaganda Corporation

The largest power company in the state of Alabama has purchased their own “news websites” to help spread propaganda and to downplay the health risks of the toxins that they are dumping in the state. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

The largest power company in the state of Alabama has purchased their own news website to help spread propaganda and to downplay the health risks of the toxins that they're dumping in the state. This is such a crazy story. Okay. First of all, you have to start off with the analysis. What's the heart of this story?

The heart is LA Times, layoffs, going outta business. Washington Post, barely hanging on, but for Bezos owns it. He's got more money than 10 Nations. He can keep it alive. Vice, Vice News, under. Sports Illustrated. You know, so there's layoffs, thousands of journalists are being laid off. We've already been, for the last 20 years, there's been no such thing as investigative journalism. It doesn't exist. They can't afford it. They don't wanna pay an investigative reporter to go study anything. And so this is the state of the American media right now. Now add to that, you've got a utility company, one of the biggest utility companies in the nation. In one of the poorest, poorest states in the nation, with the highest bills in the nation, that they own the news in Alabama. Is that an overstatement?

No. And in fact, they've gone to the next step of, originally what they could do is they could do all the advertising on the local channels. They get in good. They know these people. They can get the favorable coverage they want. But Alabama Power decided to take it a step further. You know what? We, because of the internet, anybody can run a news website. So they said, why don't, let's just build our own news website where we put out what they call the good news. Because we don't wanna focus on the bad in Alabama. They wanna focus on good things and all of the good things are about how amazing Alabama Power is, even as they just made an agreement where they're now allowed to import coal ash toxins from other states and dump 'em into the poor communities in Alabama. And that's a good thing.

Well, okay, residents of the seventh poorest state in all of America, have the most expensive monthly electric bills in the United States topping $700 a month. Now, these are people barely hanging on. But the story really started where these people said, Alabama Power and light, you're killing us. You have this dust that's causing lung disease. It's causing neuropathies. It's causing really health problems for our children. It's giving our children asthma. And would you do something about it? It's got mercury, it's got arsenic, it's got cadmium in it. And they said, nah, I don't think we're gonna do anything about it. I think we're just gonna make it sound good. We're gonna give you some good news. That literally, what you just said is literally the words they used. That is that we're buying the News Center Operation. That's what it's called, News Center Operation. And it's entirely paid for by the electricity customers. You understand? They're charging these customers that are complaining, you're killing us with the environmental disaster you've caused and you're killing us 'cause we can't afford to pay for this. But then they have those same customers paying for this thing that's called the News Center Operation, which is supposed to be good news. We're only gonna report good news, right? Did I get that right?

Absolutely. And a lot of times, well, in the past, I guess these corporations, what they would do is instead of buying their own news website, they would send money to think tanks or industry front groups. And those front groups would be the ones that would run these websites and do these phony studies saying that, oh, climate change isn't real, or these chemicals, yeah, they're giving you cancer, but they sure taste good.