Earth Day is the biggest lefty environmental celebration of the year, and the news media and George Soros love it. In fact, the liberal billionaire has given more than $20 million to groups partnered with Earth Day 2013.
Earth Day is always a media favorite. “It’s a great day to ride your bicycle” anchor Natalie Morales exclaimed on the April 1 edition of NBC’s Today. Just this month ahead of Earth Day, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have all written stories that mention the upcoming holiday, including promoting an environmentalist’s “love letter to the planet,” publishing lesson plans [1] for students about Earth Day, and touting the opening of the “world’s greenest” office building on Earth Day.
But the media aren’t alone in promoting this lefty event. The U.S State Department announced its part in a partnership with the Earth Day Network and the D.C. diplomatic community, called the D.C. Greening Embassies Forum. The forum will discuss ways to make the embassies in Washington D.C. more eco-friendly.
There are other government agency partners, including the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, the Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture. All are listed as partners on the Earth Day 2013 website [2].
This media-hyped and government-promoted left-wing holiday has also gotten substantial funding from Soros. Since 2000, Soros [3] has given at least $20,131,868 million through his Open Society Foundations to organizations supporting Earth Day 2013.
Alliance for Climate Protection ($10,000,000)
NAACP ($4,488,000)
Natural Resources Defense Council ($2,058,011)
Union of Concerned Scientists ($900,000)
World Resources Institute ($752,637)
Earth Justice ($555,000)
Earth Island Institute ($500,000)
Defenders of Wildlife ($350,000)
Oxfam America ($273,585)
Unitarian Universalist Association ($100,000)
William C. Velasquez Institute ($75,000)
Vital Voices Global Partnership ($50,000)
World Wildlife Fund ($20,735)
350.org ($8,900)
Soros is one of the primary funders of left-wing and liberal media groups. Since 2000, he has given more then $550 million to liberal organizations in the United States, including $52 million to fund an extensive network of liberal media outlets.
Media often focus on environmental issues and frequently take the liberal point of view on the subject. Climate change, for example, has been a threat for more than 100 years, according to the news media. During that time, they have waffled between alarmism over cooling and worry over warming [4]. Time magazine’s science editor Charles Alexander, at a Sept. 16, 1989, global warming conference spoke for the rest of the media when he confessed: “I would freely admit on this issue we have crossed the boundary from news reporting to advocacy.”
The very first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970, amid hysteria about the dangers of a new ice age. The media had been spreading fear of a cooling period [5] since the 1950s, but those alarms grew louder in the 1970s. The first Earth Day was also the hundredth anniversary of Vladimir Lenin’s birthday. While Earth Day activists deny a connection, Lenin himself would mandate days of community service to improve the environment—every year on his birthday [6].
Three months before the first Earth Day, on Jan. 11, 1970, The Washington Post told readers to “get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come,” in an article titled “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age.” The article quoted climatologist Reid Bryson, who said of the cooling trend: “there’s no relief in sight.”
The media have consistently hyped Earth Day, even at the cost of more relevant news events. The January 2012 March for Life rally was attended by at least tens of thousands of pro-lifers, but CNN only gave it two brief mentions on-air. However, when reportedly only hundreds [7] showed up to celebrate Earth Day on the National Mall the same year, CNN touted it as a "big rally" and covered it in-depth on Sunday afternoon, telling its viewers "we want you to know all about this."
In 2011, the broadcast networks treated Good Friday and Earth Day as equals [8], putting the day when Christians worldwide remember Christ’s death on the same platform as the 41-year-old eco-celebration.
This year, the Earth Day 2013 official website includes an interactive “Ecological Footprint Calculator [9],” where users can input how much they drive, what they eat, and how much power they use to determine how big their ecological footprint is. But even an American eco-saint [10] couldn’t do enough to save the planet from running out of resources according to the quiz. Of course, environmentalists have been scaremongering about the end of resources for years and turned out to be wildly wrong [11].
According to the Earth Day site [12], “[m]ore than 1 billion people now participate in Earth Day activities each year, making it the largest civic observance in the world.”