It had to happen: our old friends at Tech Central Station have found a new way to slip partisan propaganda into the discursive bloodstream -- a supposedly amateur parody of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, which they're inconveniently flogging during a heatwave. The Wall Street Journal has the scoop; part on their free blog:
The [YouTube] video’s maker is listed as “Toutsmith,” a 29-year-old who identifies himself as being from Beverly Hills in an Internet profile. In an email exchange with The Wall Street Journal, Toutsmith didn’t answer when asked who he was or why he made the video, which has just over 59,000 views on YouTube. However, computer routing information contained in an email sent from Toutsmith’s Yahoo account indicate it didn’t come from an amateur working out of his basement.
Instead, the email originated from a computer registered to DCI Group, a Washington, D.C., public relations and lobbying firm whose clients include oil company Exxon Mobil Corp
Follow to the pay article and the DCI trail is elaborated:
A DCI Group spokesman declines to say whether or not DCI made the anti-Gore penguin video, or to explain why Toutsmith appeared to be sending email from DCI's computers. "DCI Group does not disclose the names of its clients, nor do we discuss the work that we do on our clients' behalf," says Matt Triaca, who heads DCI's media relations shop ... DCI is no stranger to the debate over global warming. Partly through Tech Central Station, an opinion Web site it operates, DCI has sought to raise doubts about the science of global warming and about Mr. Gore's film, placing skeptical scientists on talk-radio shows and paying them to write editorials.
A couple of days after YouTube was used to disseminate a doctored clip of Michigan Congressman John Dingell seeming to support Hezbollah, another patch of Internet is, not unexpectedly, not always what it seems.
UPDATE: The Times (UK) covers the story.
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