Now, I don’t know if you have seen this on the news, but the other day a so-called “business reporter” started railing against President Obama’s Housing Plan. Here’s a little background on the plan: http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/02/18/obama-housing/
Regarding the video below: what the business reporter was basically trying to do (although he doesn’t tell you this), is paint Obama’s Housing Plan as “rewarding bad irresponsible” behavior without actually acknowleding that the Housing Plan is (well, in my opinion) just trying to help people stay in their homes so that by staying in their homes the massive amount of foreclosures stop, which would have an aggregate positive impact on improving the overall economy.Â
The plan, however, threatens to cut into the banks’ profits; these lending institutions made irresponsible investments and arguably they are the ones to blame for the crisis, not the people that got steered or suckered into their bad mortgages. If the lending institution acted like a loan shark, shouldn’t they take responsibility for the crisis rather than blaming it on the people that got suckered into taking loans that they couldn’t afford in the first place? Also, shouldn’t we stop the foreclosures anyway because these massive amounts of foreclosures are bound to drive down property values further, making things worst? According to this reporter, we shouldn’t do anything to help homeowners. Watch:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEZB4taSEoA]
Now, regardless or not whether you agree with my point of view on this, here’s the shocking part. Now there’s reports that this business reporter was part of a massive pro-banking institution PR campaign to stop the Housing Plan:
I’m reposting the revelations from DailyKos (original link at: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/2/28/22947/5824/608/703150):
CNBC Hoaxes America
by Devilstower
Sat Feb 28, 2009 at 08:50:05 PM PST
It’s starting to look like we may all be victims of the biggest product placement ad ever staged, and the product being placed is pure right wing astroturf. In short, America may have been scammed by a collaboration between CNBC and conservative media consultants.
According to an article appearing in Playboy, CNBC’s “Chicago Tea Party” was a hoax planned well in advance of Rick Santelli’s trading floor meltdown.
But was Santelli’s rant really so spontaneous? How did a minor-league TV figure, whose contract with CNBC is due this summer, get so quickly launched into a nationwide rightwing blog sensation? Why were there so many sites and organizations online and live within minutes or hours after his rant, leading to a nationwide protest just a week after his rant?
What hasn’t been reported until now is evidence linking Santelli’s “tea party” rant with some very familiar names in the Republican rightwing machine, from PR operatives who specialize in imitation-grassroots PR campaigns (called “astroturfing”) to bigwig politicians and notorious billionaire funders.
If this article is correct, then CNBC has staged the news, not just a single incident, but a whole string of discussions and programs that have been at the center of CNBC’s programming since Santelli’s staged rant. And from the evidence — including the fact that the website used to organize the so-called tea party was created well in advance by the same right wing sources who orchestrated the Obama-Ayers story — it appears that at least some of those involved were in on the scam.
What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced.
Maybe this is part of their new cost-cutting measures on CNBC. After all, it’s a lot easier to just create the news yourself rather than report it. Or maybe Santelli, whose contract is up soon, was collecting a paycheck from other sources than just NBC.
But if there’s any truth to this, more than an apology is going to be necessary.
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Suffice to say, sometimes what you watch on a newscast and are billed as “news reports” are not news reports at all but rather TV commercials posing as “news” to make you believe a point of view and influence your opinion in favor of a product-in this case, in favor of protecting the banking institutions’ all mighty profits.