As I noted in my column earlier this month, the new Matt Damon anti-fracking movie Promised Land was financed in part by Big Foreign Oil:

Oh, and by the way, “Promised Land” was financed in part by Image Nation Abu Dhabi, a company wholly-owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates. In other words, a major oil-producing OPEC country was underwriting a film that tries to discourage natural gas (and oil) exploration.

Today, my fellow Examiner columnist Ron Arnold has dug a little deeper in that area:

Thanks to this serendipitous glimpse into the guts of “Promised Land,” I went exploring in Al Jazeera TV archives and found them infested with no-new-energy-for-North-America propaganda — short clips and major documentaries against energy development by the United States and Canada. I found major emphasis on getting President Obama to kill the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have transported synthetic crude oil from the Athabasca oil sands in Alberta, Canada. Al Jazeera TV evidently became part of a 2008 anti-industry “Tar Sands Campaign” operated by Michael Northrop, program director with Rockefeller Brothers Fund, posting scurrilously abusive presentations against the energy project.

Al Jazeera is financed by the government of Qatar, another member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Or as it is more commonly called, OPEC.