Chevron pulling sponsorship of 'PBS NewsHour'

[Kadie]

Chevron pulling sponsorship of 'PBS NewsHour'
Andrew S. Ross
Tuesday, November 8, 2011


snip...
At the end of the year, the San Ramon company is pulling its sponsorship of the show, which it has underwritten to the tune of $2 million a year for the past four years.

"We constantly review which media we use to reach our target audience given our yearly budget and specific goals," Brent Tippen, a Chevron spokesman, told the New York Times, which reported the story Monday. "We hope that we will be able to partner with them again at some point in the future."

In its story, the Times noted that the PBS ombudsman, Michael Getler, took the company to task in September over one of its spots. Getler had focused on an assertion from one character that "every penny and more (of Chevron's profits last year) went into bringing energy to the world."

Responding to a number of viewer complaints, Getler said the words "sound implausible, at best, to my layman's ears and then up the scale to misleading. So I count myself as among those troubled by the assertion and the lack of a convincing explanation that laymen can understand."

Surely, that wouldn't have had anything to do with Chevron is pulling its sponsorship?

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/07/BUN11LRJ9P.DTL#ixzz1d8HPDaEI

[NightWatcher]

1. maybe PBS Newshour can now tell of the evils of Big Oil

Every time you see a commercial for "Clean Coal", America's Natural Gas....it isnt to talk the consumer into buying anything. It's to bribe the networks into only speaking positive about the dirty fossil fuel industry and not tell of their faults.

[no_hypocrisy]

5. + 1. My very first thought.

[qb]

2. When corporate sponsorship becomes less important than individual donations,

I might consider supporting "public" media again.

[Enrique]

3. every time I watch an MSNBC video I see an Exxon ad

making various factual claims.

is there an ombudsman there concerned with the truthfulness of those ads?

[barbtries]

4. anybody else watch maddow online?

the exxon commercials never fail to piss me off.

as for chevron, they are dedicated to their bullshit. of course that's why. not to mention that the viewership is probably better informed than their "target audience."

greed. sigh.