Conservative filmmaker Phelim McAleer has a new film challenging Josh Fox and his claims about hydraulic fracturing. McAleer’s GasHoax will be released on October 1, the same day as Fox’s latest short film, GasWork, will be aired on MSNBC.
The head-to-head match up is intentional. McAleer said GasWork is “a zero credibility film because it comes from filmmaker Josh Fox who has a history of health hoaxes regarding fracking.” He has criticized Fox for his past claims about flammable water and breast cancer links, calling them “nonsense.”
Reason.com called the cancer claim one of “the top 5 lies about fracking.” Fox made that connection in the 2012 short film called The Sky is Pink.
“The claim is entirely specious. Fox apparently based his lightly sourced assertion on a single newspaper article. Even that article garbled the data ...” science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote at Reason. Bailey pointed out that The Associated Press actually turned to medical experts and both said “that there was no evidence of an increase in breast cancer in the counties cited by Fox.”
In McAleer’s earlier work, FrackNation, he asked Fox about occurrences of naturally flammable water predating hydraulic fracturing technology. Fox replied that he was aware of it, but it didn’t matter, even though his films Gasland and Gasland II portrayed flammable water as a result of fracking activity. According to an Investor’s Business Daily editorial, some funding for Gasland came from the government of Venezuela, where dictator Hugo Chavez ruled (at the time). The second was produced by HBO Documentary.
“Journalists should reject all of Fox’s claims about fracking and health until he corrects the record and apologizes for his notorious film, The Sky Is Pink, which claims that fracking causes breast cancer — a claim rejected by all leading cancer experts,” McAleer told Breitbart.com. Breitbart will release GasHoax at 9 a.m. Oct. 1. The film will challenge Fox’s misleading claims, showing how many have been debunked and will criticize the media for promoting Fox and his misleading films.
Fox’s latest anti-fracking hit job will debut on MSNBC’s All in with Chris Hayes later the same day. Based on the trailer, it is clear Gaswork will portray natural gas drilling as wildly unsafe and unregulated, by interviewing the grieving friends and family of C.J. Bevins, an oil and gas worker who was crushed by a forklift in New York state. The trailer shows a politician claiming “there’s no worker safety, there’s no site safety,” and other sources warning about the dangers of chemical exposure.
Certainly, oil and natural gas drilling is hard work. Like many other blue-collar jobs there is greater risk than in a white-collar job. Not everyone can have a job as safe as Fox’s own propagandist filmmaking gig which earns him liberal accolades while he campaigns against energy and puts other people’s jobs at risk.
