Will Shill for Nukes: Decommissioning the nuclear lobby's phony op-ed campaign

[bananas]

Great article from 2004 showing how the Nuclear Energy Institute deceives people.
This has been going on for decades.

http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid%3A206880

APRIL 16, 2004: NEWS
Will Shill for Nukes
Decommissioning the nuclear lobby's phony op-ed campaign
BY WILLIAM M. ADLER

<snip>

The op-ed was ginned up, assembly-line style, by a Washington, D.C., public relations firm that the nuclear power lobby retains to tilt public opinion in favor of the stalled Yucca Mountain project. (Unmentioned in Landsberger's plea for official rectitude are the myriad of unresolved scientific, technical, and legal questions about the viability of burying high-level waste in Nevada.) Besides reading and approving the column, all Landsberger did to take credit for authorship was insert his name and position at UT, and forward it via e-mail to the Statesman – even that address provided by the PR firm. (He also sent the column to several other Texas newspapers, none of which printed it.)

Landsberger's accomplice is Theodore M. Besmann, an Oak Ridge employee since 1985. Besmann is a prolific correspondent. Beginning at least as far back as 1978, he has had published under his own or others' names dozens of nuclear love songs in newspapers across the country, from The New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle to The Washington Post to the Houston Chronicle to The Christian Science Monitor ("Nuclear: The Environment's Friend," appeared in the Monitor in 1994).

Landsberger says he doesn't know who actually wrote his column. He received it, via e-mail, from an employee at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. (Landsberger emphasized that he believed the employee, whom he wouldn't name, sent him the column as a private citizen, rather than on behalf of the national lab.) Nor was this the first time; when it comes to deceiving newspaper readers on behalf of a stealth nuclear lobbying campaign, Landsberger is an acknowledged recidivist. "I've been doing this four or five years," he says. "They come from Oak Ridge maybe two or three times a year, particularly when there's a hot-button issue."

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[kristopher]

1. Certainly no ambiguity about those poll questions...

[bananas]

2. Thanks - I wanted to make sure people knew what they were voting for.