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Essay On Corporations And Free Markets

Decent Essays

Chaz Hogenauer
Honr 292
11/24/2017
How Corporations and Free Markets Affect the Creation of Knowledge In our society there is knowledge created every second of every day. All day long there are new stories covered by CNN, FOX News, ABC News, The Young Turks, etc. and even more rapidly than these news stations can cover stories articles are published on Facebook, Twitter, Redit etc. This creates a nonstop flow of media and new stories right into our cells phones, laptops, televisions, and even now our watches. Some might argue this is a bad thing; some might argue that this is a good thing, but not many of us stop to think about many of these new stories were created. And even fewer of us stop to consider how the facts that were used to …show more content…

One of the best examples of this is the fracking industry. Corporations in the fracking industry are constantly funding and publishing research that shows that the issues that are usually associated with a fracking area and not a result of the fracking itself. One of the studies that I found on hydraulic fracturing stated in bold on the top of the article, “There have been confirmed cases of groundwater contamination in hydraulic fracturing in the at least 2 million wells fracked over the past 65+ years.” When I researched the impact of hydraulic fracturing in the EPA’s website I found that they stated, the “EPA found the hydraulic fracturing can impact drinking water resources.” This is a complete contraction to the other study that seemed to be funded by the fracking industry or a cooperation in that industry. The corporation is attempting to create the knowledge that hydraulic fracking does not impact the surrounding groundwater or drinking water, while the EPA (a more unbias source) disagrees with them. If the fracking corporation were able to win the public option with their studies the public would be much more receptive to the corporation installing new drilling operations in their community. These corporations have many different tactics that they use to influence the conclusions of a study. One of these is the suppression or termination of certain research if it were to negatively affect the companies bottom line. A corporation might choose to fund

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