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No free speech in fracking country?
Fed up with the local media, citizens pay to put up their own billboards warning about the impacts of fracking. Now, they're being censored by the billboard companies.
No free speech in fracking country?
Natural gas companies drilling in Pennsylvania's stretch of the Marcellus Shale have become major media spenders, investing in billboards, newspaper advertisements and even financing a highly promoted a local hospital expansion, to the point where some local citizens feel they no longer have a voice. "It’s kind of like the company town of coal-mining days," says Rebecca Roter, a resident of Brooklyn Township, Susquehanna County.
Fed up with the fracking messages dominating local media, Roter and her neighbors decided to lease their own billboard space, to host warnings about the impact of fracking. Now, she says, they're being censored by the billboard company.
Roter first purchased billboard space a few years ago to warn about effect of fracking on the local water supply and environment. One ad, with the slogan "Water is Life," ran for almost two years. But last spring, Roter says the billboard company, Park Outdoor Advertising, decided to take down the ad, which included an image of three glasses of discolored well water from local counties where drilling is underway, alongside the question: "Would you drink this gasfield tap water?" She says Park also declined to run a billboard with a photo of a dead frog in an open evaporation pit, telling her the materials were "too controversial."
A few weeks ago, Roter contracted with Park to put up another billboard, this one with an image of a gas flare — a commonplace sight, she says, in Susquehanna County — alongside the message "Keep Our Families Safe" and the phone number for an EPA tip line. Since then, a Park Outdoor sales representative told Roter in an email, "We cannot accept controversial advertisement requests." Roter says she spoke with Park Outdoor president David Feldman, who told her the word "safe" and the image of the "flare" were too controversial, but that he would consider a revised advertisement. Feldman did not respond to a request for comment.
"If we do not compromise with him, we will have no voice on any of the billboards, and I don’t want to do that. That would be too disheartening," Roter concludes. "I will tone it down, but I will not be shut out."
She doesn't have much choice. Because Park Outdoor is a private company, they can pick and choose their messages. What worries Roter is that they appear to be bowing to pressure from their gas industry clientele. Last year, another citizen billboard drew fire from Cabot, which has wells in the area, and was subsequently removed. Local newspapers, meanwhile, laden with gas industry ads, are "all PR," Roter says. "The first-ever Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection hearing on a natural gas compressor, which we citizens won by public comment, was held here, and there was no coverage in our local paper. Nothing it never made it into any media."
disgraceful lack of free speech after the gas industry comes to town--— veraduerga- Since when is the slogan "Keep Our Families Safe" considered controversial?— mau628
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