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 | Teacher, green groups "shamelessly" exploit school kids Posted by Robert Bidinotto on 12/23/2004, 10:51am | |
| The past few days a U. S. media controversy has erupted over an environmentalist group's shameless manipulation of elementary school children for propaganda purposes. I am happy to have played a role in exposing this outrage, as I outline in this entry on my blog. The Rainforest Action Network -- a "direct action" environmental group, operating with the help of a sympathetic public school teacher and compliant school administration -- enlisted a bunch of second-grade school children to raise money for the radical green group, then to participate in RAN's organized public protest campaign against the lending practices of the JP Morgan Chase financial institution. On December 16th, RAN and the teacher paraded these innocents in front of media cameras at the corporation's offices, each bearing a hand-drawn poster with slogans such as, "Save the Rainforest. Save the World. Please protect the rainforest instead of hurting the Earth for oil." First reported on Fox News by Rick Leventhal and "JunkScience.com" gadfly Steve Milloy, this story was picked up by Cybercast News Service (CNS) reporter Marc Morano, who called me to comment. Marc's initial story, including extensive quotations from me, was widely circulated on the Web, and on popular talk shows, such "The Savage Nation." As a result, the school and teacher have been inundated with a tsunami of media inquiries and indignant public denunciations -- detailed in this follow-up story by Morano, in which the school and teacher try lamely to excuse their outrageous manipulation of their students. The effectiveness of my remarks stem from the fact that they focus on the moral aspects of the incident. I have no doubt that this is why the story has achieved such a high media profile, and generated such public indignation. --Robert Bidinotto Editor and publisher, ecoNOT.com and The Bidinotto Blog | ||
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