Fox's John Stossel penned a column on the "Green Baloney" at The New York Times featuring a May 13 story headlined "In Reversal, E.P.A. Eases Path for a Mine Near Alaska's Bristol Bay." It came with a big aerial picture of Dillingham, a fishing village on an inlet of the bay. We'll get to how "near" the mine is to the bay in a minute. They have hoped to mine copper, gold, and silver at the site.
While this was just another of their stories about how Donald Trump will poison America, it caught my eye because of the big photo and because I once reported on that mine. Attempted mine, I should say. No holes have been dug.
I reported on Pebble Mine because the EPA rejected the mine even before its environmental impact statement was submitted. The Obama EPA squashed Pebble like it squashed the Keystone XL pipeline. It just said no.
This shocked CEO Tom Collier. He's a Democrat who managed environment policy for Al Gore and Bill Clinton. He was convinced Pebble could be developed safely and assumed EPA regulators would follow their own rules. They didn't.
"They killed this project before any science was done, and there are memos that show that!" Collier complained.
It turns out that the leftists at the Natural Resources Defense Council had killed the project. Nancy Stoner, an NRDC activist, entered into the government and colluded with her old colleagues to kill the project. Stossel pressed their spokesman Bob Deans (a former White House reporter for Cox Newspapers) to justify their actions, and he said the government should approve the "right" projects...like solar and wind projects.
Stossel reported the Times has a history of shoddy scare-stories about the "threat" of the Pebble Bay mine. This latest one was reported by Tatiana Schlossberg -- who is Caroline Kennedy's daughter, granddaughter of JFK and Jackie Onassis. He mocked the math of her recent piece "23 Environmental Rules Rolled Back in Trump's First 100 Days." That's a fake headline in an age where headlines circulate on social media and affect public opinion before anyone clicks on the article. But the article lists only nine. Fourteen others were "under review" or in "limbo" -- not rolled back.
Schlossberg is not a stickler for accuracy, not when liberal-activist hyperbole works better:
Her Bristol Bay story claimed the proposed Pebble Mine was "on" Bristol Bay. But it isn't. It's more than 100 miles away.
When we asked Schlossberg about that, she replied, "I'm not going to comment on that. If you have a problem or a question, you can direct it to the standards editor."
So we did, and to my surprise, the standards editor published a correction: "The mine is not on Bristol Bay itself."
But he defended the Times' headline saying "near Bristol Bay" because "it is in the watershed of Bristol Bay ... the mine could affect the fishery."
I suppose it "could." Most anything "could." But "near" the bay? To me, "near" is 200 yards, or maybe half a mile, but not 100 miles.
Stossel joked: "Forget the anti-development phrase NIMBY (Not In My Backyard). Now it's BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody)."
PS: Here's how Ms. Schlossberg spun her story on Twitter:
