Ann McElhinney

Ann McElhinney
Born	Ireland
Occupation	Speaker, filmmaker, journalist
Known for	global warming, journalism and film-making
Notable work(s)	Not Evil Just Wrong and Mine Your Own Business
Spouse	Phelim McAleer

Ann McElhinney is an Irish journalist and documentary filmmaker. She has written and produced the political documentaries Not Evil Just Wrong and Mine Your Own Business, as well as The Search for Tristan's Mum and Return to Sender. She is married to fellow documentary-maker and journalist Phelim McAleer.

Films

Not Evil Just Wrong

Not Evil Just Wrong is a film McElhinney and McAleer directed and produced to challenge Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. It suggests that the evidence for human-caused global warming is inconclusive, and that the impact of suggested legislation for mitigating climate change would be much more harmful to humans than beneficial. The movie was filmed in 2008, and was screened at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and at the Right Online conference in 2009.

Not Evil, Just Wrong attempted to break a World Record for largest simultaneous premiere that is currently held by The Age of Stupid. The film was endorsed by some within the Tea Party movement, and McElhinney's website claims that there were 6,500 U.S. screenings and 1,500 foreign screenings--that reached 400,000 people.

In 2010, the directors cooperated with the Independent Women's Forum to create a program, Balanced Education for Everyone (B.E.E.) that seeks to place Not Evil Just Wrong in schools; the concept was an attempt to teach both sides of the climate-change debate.

Mine Your Own Business

Mine Your Own Business is a documentary that looked at campaigns by foreign environmentalists against a large scale mining project in Romania that never came to fruition. The film looked at how the lives of the poor people in the area would have been affected if the mine had been built, and gave a voice to poor, umeployed people who lived in desperate situations and would have been able to afford such things as indoor plumbing if the project had gone through.

When the documentary was reviewed by environmentalists it was compared to pornography and Nazi propaganda.^{[citation needed]} McElhinney later received two death threats because of the content of this documentary." Eighty environmentalist organizations tried to have the National Geographic cancel a screening at the organization's headquarters in 2006.^{[citation needed]}

The UK Guardian described the documentary as "a Michael Moore-style documentary [that] casts the green movement as the influential villain of a worldwide campaign to block development and deny people the chance of jobs and a decent life."^{[citation needed]}

The Search for Tristan's Mum

McElhinney directed and co-producted "The Search for Tristan's Mum," which highlights the case of a toddler Tristan Dowse who was adopted by an Irish couple at birth--and then abandoned in an Indonesian orphanage two years later. It broadcast on RTÉ 1, the Irish state television station, in 2005. As part of the film project, McElhinney located Tristan's mother, and reunited her with her son.

This film was selected to be part of Input 2006, a showcase for programs representing national public broadcasters from around the world, and was duly screened for industry professionals at the film festival that year in Taiwan in May.

Journalism

McElhinney has made documentaries for the BBC, CBC (Canada), and RTE (Ireland). She has been a guest on Dennis Miller and the erstwhile Randi Rhodes show. McElhinney has worked as a journalist and filmmaker in the US, Canada, Romania, Bulgaria, Chile, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Ghana and Uganda.

Public appearances

McElhinney is a popular speaker at conservative conferences. Her most recent appearance was at Right Online in Las Vegas, hosted by Americans for Prosperity, where she spoke out in reaction to Van Jones--who had made an appearance at Netroots Nation. She spoke at both the 2009 and 2010 Conservative Political Action Conferences. In 2009, a U.S. poll identified McElhinney and her husband, Phelim McAleer, as the most popular conservative speakers after broadcaster Rush Limbaugh and columnist Ann Coulter.

McElhinney is considered a supporter of some "Tea Party" groups, and in fact she spoke at the Sacramento Tea Party tax day protest in 2010.

The Constitutional Coalition's "Educational Policy Conference" in St. Louis, Missouri also hosted McElhinney, and she received a standing ovation there for endorsing capitalism and proclaiming that anthropogenic global warming does not constitute proven science.

James Cameron

AB 32

In October 2010, James Cameron donated $1 million to oppose California's Prop 23, which would have overturned AB 32—California's climate change legislation. In response to this donation, McElhinney and McAleer made an short film; it alleged that passage of AB 32 would increase Californians' energy costs, and suggested that Cameron, who'd been quoted as saying, "we are going to have to live with less," lives a more energy-extravagant life than most Americans. The Independent said that this attack advertisement might "be tapping a rich rhetorical vein", but "conveniently ignores the fact that Cameron pays to off-set his personal carbon emissions".

External links

• Not Evil Just Wrong, Bio of Ann McElhinney
• Ann McElhinney, Twitter
• Sutherland Institute, Ann McElhinney's Bio