Newly-minted Shale shill Tracy Rowlett now broadcasting for Radio Free Chesapeake

by Steve Smith of West and Clear

If you’ve ever heard a story about a coup d’etat in some Third World country, one of the checkmarks on the to-do list after install a puppet government and secure the government buildings is, of course, to capture the radio station. Why? Because information is power. Control the flow of information, and you control the power.

So when I heard that Chesapeake, um, I mean Branded News hired Tracy Rowlett, it seemed pretty obvious what was happening. Radio Free Chesapeake is now on the air!

Funny thing is that Tracy is a wee bit sensitive about some of the criticism he’s been getting. “I am catching hell, but the unfortunate truth is most of what the bloggers are saying isn’t true.” Yeah, you know those bloggers.

In the same interview, Rowlett told Unfair Park’s Robert Wilonsky: “You and I both know the news business isn’t what it was when we started. The fact is, we’re not covering Shale issues.”

Well, Tracy, maybe you and Channel 11 haven’t. Funny, I thought you used to have some kind of pull there once. I’m sure Channel 11’s news choices didn’t have anything to do with the Chesapeake gas well right behind your East Fort Worth studios.

Just because your guys at 11 weren’t getting the job done, don’t paint your TV news colleagues with such a broad brush. Some of them have been covering gas drilling and safety issues. Brett Shipp from Channel 8 has won a Peabody Award for investigating Texas Railroad Commission malfeasance and recently delivered an excellent report on the Commission’s cozy relationship with the energy industry. Shipp’s Channel 8 colleague Chris Hawes has also logged lots of time covering Barnett Shale issues. Hell, even freaking Fox4 News had a great story recently about Jay Marcom, the Stephens County rancher who complained to the Texas Railroad Commission about a gas pipeline leak on his property in 2007. Even though the RRC said it couldn’t find any benzene on Marcom’s land, last month FOX4 collected a sample and found it had benzene levels 121,000 times higher that the state allows in groundwater.

You know what that is Tracy? That’s TV journalism at its best. If you’ve been too busy covering apartment fires and the latest trends in cosmetic surgery, you have no one to blame but yourself. You got your ass kicked by Fox News. That’s just shameful.

You want to cover a story that needs covering? How about how the week after more than 200 people showed up at City Hall complaining about the depredations visited upon them largely by your employer’s employer, the Task Force not only dismissed the public comments outright, they even openly mocked the man who was nearly asphyxiated by gas from a nearby drilling site and who wept openly when he described his experience. Nothing was ever reported about that. I would love to see how that was transcribed in the minutes, except the Task Force voted against keeping minutes of its meetings. Seems former Fort Worth mayor and current Chesapeake Barnett Shale consigliere Ken Barr didn’t deem that in Chesapeake’s, um, I mean, the public’s interest.

Some people want to make this about pro-gas drilling or anti-gas drilling. But that’s not it at all. This is about transparent government. Sure, a boring issue, but it’s only the foundation of American civilization. We are not supposed to be some banana republic where a couple of rich guys and fat-cat politcos sit around behind closed doors and decide how things are going to be. That’s not the American way, but that is the way things are done in a banana republic.

And that’s pretty much what we’ve become. Chesapeake has not only captured the radio station, they effectively have a puppet government at City Hall who will not stand in their way. Now its all about winning hearts and minds.

Tracy, you can kid yourself about Shale.TV being a bona fide source of news, but all it does is churn out spin, misinformation and propaganda.

Congratulations on capturing the radio station, Generalissimo. Radio Free Chesapeake is on the air.