Dan Gainor

Dan Gainor is the the Boone Pickens Free Market Fellow and Vice President for Business and Culture at the Media Research Center.

Criticism of Muppets
Gainor and Eric Bolling of Fox News Business jointly criticized the new Muppets movie for allegedly promoting a liberal political agenda. The plot of the movie involves the muppets trying to prevent their theater being torn down by an oil tycoon named Tex Richman. Gainor believes the movie deliberately portrays oil industry as villainous. He argued that the muppets movie, along with many other Hollywood films, ignores "what oil means for most people, which is fuel to light a hospital or heat your home or maybe fuel an ambulance to get you to a hospital if you need that. They don’t want to tell that story."

Gainor then proceeded to claim that Hollywood is brainwashing America's children: "“This is what they're teaching our kids. You wonder why we've got a bunch of Occupy Wall Street people walking all around the country: They've been indoctrinated, literally, for years by this kind of stuff. Whether it was 'Captain Planet' or Nickelodeon's ‘Big Green Help,’ or ‘The Day After Tomorrow,’ the Al Gore-influenced movie, all of that is what they're teaching, is that corporations are bad, the oil industry is bad, and ultimately what they're telling kids is what they told you in the movie ‘The Matrix:’ that mankind is a virus on poor, old Mother Earth.”

Critics of Gainor's comments noted that environmentalism was never actually mentioned in the Muppets movie.

Criticism of the Center for Media and Democracy's BanksterUSA.org
On December 11, 2011, Gainor insinuated a connection between a letter bomb recently sent to the CEO of Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt, Germany, and CMD's BanksterUSA.org project. He commented on Fox News, "The website www.Banksterusa.org, for example, claims it wants 'to be your go-to site for updates on the financial services re-regulation fight in Congress and for progressive net-roots campaigning against the big boys on Wall Street.' It all appears fairly benign, except that the logo for the site is riddled with about three dozen bullet holes." CMD's Mary Bottari wrote in response, "While I am Italian, I doubt very much that Italian anarchists are getting their inspiration from our little site, which at the moment features a Smithsonian Magazine profile of Ferdinand Pecora and which has been documenting the financial crisis for the past two years."

It goes on to remind readers that "BanksterUSA.org is 'part of the Center for Media and Democracy,' funded to the tune of $200,000 by the Open Society Institute, the charity arm of lefty investor George Soros. Apparently, some Wall Street money is OK, even for crusading progressives." Bottari responded, "Gainor falsely claimed BanksterUSA is funded by George Soros' Open Society Institute even though CMD has noted on PRWatch that its grant is for the national security and surveillance research of CMD's Executive Director, Lisa Graves, who has testified before Congress on such issues."