So much public debate these days takes place in film -- and that makes movie distributors and television networks major players in public policy. They have the power to decide which ideas make it to mass audiences, and which ideas won't. And they use it.
Tonight this will be demonstrated by PBS, which is slated to air a documentary entitled Gold Futures. The film takes a strong anti-mining stance, and focuses on Rosia Montana, Romania, where controversy over a proposed gold mine has drawn world wide attention. What PBS won't air is the other point of view--even though that, too, is amply documented in film. As followers of MPI's work know well, Mine Your Own Business takes the radical environmentalist movement to task, showing how, in opposing mines in impoverished areas, Western activists are working hard to keep the world's poorest people poor.
John Fund takes issue with PBS, and with Gold Futures, in this morning's Wall Street Journal:
While the film gives time to supporters and opponents of the mine, it leaves unsaid that half of the villagers voicing opposition have now either sold their homes or will not have to move, because they live in a protected area where the village's historic structures and churches will be preserved. Viewers who see pristine shots of the Rosia valley won't realize the hills hide a huge, abandoned communist-era mine, leaking toxic heavy metals into local streams--or that while the modern mining project will level four hills to create an open pit, it will also clean up the old mess at no cost to the Romanian treasury.The other side to the controversy is told in a new film that will never be shown on PBS, but is nonetheless rattling the environmental community. "Mine Your Own Business" is a documentary by Irish filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney. They conclude that the biggest threat to the people of Rosia Montana "comes from upper-class Western environmentalism that seeks to keep them poor and unable to clean up the horrific pollution caused by Ceausescu's mining."
Mr. McAleer, a former Financial Times journalist who has followed the mine battle for seven years, says he "found that everything the environmentalists were saying about the project was misleading, exaggerated or quite simply false." He produced his film on a shoestring $230,000 budget largely provided by Gabriel Resources, but says he was given complete editorial control.
The Gabriel funding caused environmental groups to label the film "propaganda" and demand the National Geographic Society cancel plans to rent its Washington, D.C., theater to the free-market Moving Picture Institute for a screening. The Institute notes opponents rarely challenge the film's facts. As for Mr. Kocsis's documentary, his Flora Film corporate Web site lists as its partners Greenpeace, the Hungarian Ministry of Environment and the George Soros-backed Energy Club of Hungary, all of which oppose the Romanian project on either environmental or nationalistic grounds (Transylvania used to be part of Hungary).
The ways and means of development are matters for debate, not for one-sided proselytizing. PBS should certainly air Gold Futures -- but it should also air Miine Your Own Business and let the public decide for itself where the compelling arguments are, and what should be done about global poverty. To do anything less is to fail the public the network ostensibly serves.