That said, a few additional details complicate the picture. Consider:
● One of WGBH’s board members is the brother of a prominent wind-farm opponent.
David Koch, whose $12 billion placed him 49th on Forbes’ latest ranking of the world’s billionaires, sits on WGBH’s board of directors. He also helps fund the PBS program Nova, which is produced by WGBH. Meanwhile, Bill Koch — the businessman, Museum of Fine Arts benefactor/exhibitionist, and former America’s Cup winner whose net worth is a mere $1.3 billion — is a leader of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, the major anti-wind-farm group. Bill Koch has reportedly spent more than one million dollars of his own fortune on the anti-wind-farm cause.
● WGBH’s Cape affiliates have a working partnership with the Cape Cod Times, the editorial page of which staunchly opposes Cape Wind.
Times editors regularly appear on WCAI to discuss stories in that day’s paper. During Cliff Schechtman’s 10-year tenure as editor, which ended in 2005, several critics (including former Phoenix writer Mark Jurkowitz) accused the Times of allowing its editorial stance to influence its news coverage. In 2005, for example, former Times reporter Jack Coleman wrote that Schechtman “won’t send his reporters anywhere that they might find people who overcame their initial opposition to windmills off their coast.”
Wind-farm supporters agree that the Times’ news coverage has improved since Paul Pronovost replaced Schechtman as editor. But publisher Peter Meyer — who lives in Osterville, Ground Zero for Cape Wind opposition, and does not receive flattering treatment in Cape Wind — still holds the paper’s purse strings.
● WGBH’s Cape affiliates imprudently tried to raise money from the principals in the wind-farm debate.
Earlier this year, McDonald, WCAI’s underwriting director, had a conversation with Barbara Hill, the executive director of Clean Power Now, the major pro-wind-farm group. McDonald suggested that Clean Power Now contribute $5000 to WCAI, says Hill; in exchange, information about the organization would appear on a WCAI Web site dedicated to coverage of the Cape Wind issue. She made a similar suggestion to the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound. Both groups declined.
During McDonald’s fundraising pitch, Hill claims, McDonald implied that Clean Power Now receives funding from Cape Wind Associates, the Jim Gordon–led company that’s seeking to build the wind farm. In fact, no such relationship exists. To Hill, this offhand comment suggested a fundamentally flawed understanding of the Cape Wind fight.
● Other Cape institutions seem spooked by the book.
Allen Larson of the Cape Cod Center for Sustainability recently obtained permission to use a room in the Cape Cod Museum of National History for a discussion of Cape Wind. The permission was revoked a few hours later, due to a “feeling that the authors are not unbiased.”
Wind empowerment
To wind-farm supporters — or at least to a passionate and/or conspiracy-minded few — these details suggest that something nefarious is afoot. On May 19, the online publication Cape Cod Today ran a piece by editor and publisher Walter Brooks — whose single-minded support for the wind farm resembles the Cape Cod Times editorial page’s determined opposition — titled “Media boycott of book causes windstorm of protest.” (Get it?) Brooks also reprinted several letters that Cape-dwelling wind-farm supporters had written to WGBH president Henry Becton; the writers accused WGBH’s Cape stations of bad journalism and warned that they’d be reconsidering their future support for WCAI.
