CNSNews.com keeps up its shilling for the oil industry — which has funded CNS’ parent, the Media Research Center — in a spate of recent articles.
In a March 13 article, Penny Starr lets the American Petroleum Institute uncritically attack Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s claim that the oil and gas industry is not taking advantage of the leases it already holds. Starr does not permit anyone to respond to the API’s claims.
Melanie Hunter managed to derive three separate articles out of a C-SPAN interview with former Shell Oil President John Hofmeister. The first, in which Hofmeister claims that, in Hunter’s words, “the U.S. won’t have enough oil to fill gas tanks whatever the price and that high gas prices could lead to another recession,” is seemingly contradicted by the second, in which Hofmeister notes that the recession has reduced U.S. demand for oil, and has a result “the [oil] companies are not just going to let gasoline sit in storage tanks, when the demand by Americans has been reduced. They’re going to sell it outside the country, which is what they’re doing.”
Hunter seems uninterested in exploring whether U.S. oil needs would be better met if oil companies weren’t exporting U.S. petroleum products.
The third article reinforces the right-wing talking point that most new drilling takes place on private land and that federal land permits have been “dramatically reduced in the last several years.”