What Does Josh Fox Care About: The Truth or Crowd-Pleasing Theatrics?

Another article from Energy in Depth takes a look at the reasons legitimate investigative journalists should probably be looking a lot closer at Josh Fox's claims and whether there is any truth behind them, rather than quoting him as the most reliable source of information on fracking.  Here is an excerpt:
No. 2 – The Milanville “Native” Who Grew Up in New York City
Fox regularly pretends to have grown up in Milanville, Wayne County, Pennsylvania.  This notion  is picked up regularly by his admirers in the press and, as recently as earlier today, theShale Gas Review blog described him, falsely, as a “native of Milanville.”  A Google search of “‘Josh Fox’ Milanville” returns 15,500 results, in fact, indicating this particular fabrication has also taken hold in the popular imagination.  Here’s what Fox himself said to an Indiewireinterviewer in January, 2010, when talking about his movie Gasland:
I was compelled to make “GASLAND” out of necessity. I was asked to lease my family’s land in the Upper Delaware River Basin, the only consistent home I’ve had throughout my life, for Natural Gas Drilling in May of 2008. I looked into it and found out that the Natural Gas industry was leasing thousands of acres all across New York State and PA and proposing the most massive drilling campaign in the east in history.
This is in sharp contrast to what he said less than a year earlier when he talking to Indiewireabout his movie Memorial Day:
I’m 36, grew up in New York City. One of my earliest memories is of the 1977 blackout when I was five. My whole neighborhood was destroyed. Every store window smashed and looted, Riverside Park was blaring with boom boxes and with heat. It was a loud place to be. I remember growing up in a city full of guns and drugs and violence and homeless people and yuppies and AIDS. And great art, great music, great films. Scorsese, metal shows, CBGB ska shows and hardcore matinees. Live atmosphere. The rush of electricity on the streets. And danger. So everything I make I try to push all of that energy into it somehow.
Apparently, his home town and early life changes with every movie theme.  It’s part of the act, you see, part of that bigger reality into which he regularly immerses himself, but, of course, one of these statements is a lie.  We have a pretty good idea which one from some research Peter Wynne did.  He found some theater program notes where Fox says he “was born and raised above 96th street and grew up almost entirely in Manhattan.”  Isn’t it interesting that no one asks about this either, not even Indiewire, which reported the two different versions of Fox’s life history?  Perhaps this, too, works against the desired narrative.
This is a very small excerpt of this post, and it's an article worth reading.  Check out the rest of it here.

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