Are the Swift Boaters Mounting a Stealth Climate Attack?

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Creative Response Concepts, the public relations firm behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smear campaign, appears to be mounting an under-the-radar attack on climate action via Twitter. They just don’t want me to know what they’re up to.

Staffers over at CRC have been tweeting furiously on global warming issues for the past few months—attacking not only climate legislation but climate science.

A few examples, from CRC senior vice president Michael Russell:

UN Scientist admits issuing phony climate data to put pressure on world leaders http://bit.ly/7s6ezP #tcot

SF Chronicle on Copenhagen climate summit – many arrived in carbon burning private jets and limos http://bit.ly/4ZNvok #tcot cap and trade

Economist, author,Thomas Sowell writes on the “Science Mantra” of global warming and its hysteria. http://bit.ly/90D5kz #tcot cap and trade

CRC president Greg Mueller and account associate Marianne Brennan have also been hyping up stories about the “ClimateGate” hacked emails and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s inaccurate glacier data.

So who is CRC working for? It’s not clear if their Twitter efforts are independent or on behalf of a particular client, though their list includes many players seeking to undermine climate science. The firm’s clients have included the National Republican Congressional Committee, National Taxpayers Union, Republican National Committee, Free Enterprise Foundation, American International Automobile Dealers Assoc., Corn Refiners Association, and the creationists at the Discovery Institute. CRC also has close ties with the conservative media machine, using avenues like the Drudge Report and Cybercast News Service to push the Swift Boat story. I called CRC headquarters to find out more about their climate campaign, but Russell didn’t return calls—and then blocked me from following him on Twitter. Of course, like anyone else I can still access the CRC staffers’ Twitter page. Is there something that CRC wants to hide?

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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