https://grist.org/climate/how-the-oil-industry-pumped-americans-full-of-fake-news/
How the oil industry pumped Americans full of fake news
By Kate Yoder on Feb 7, 2020
The world has known about the dangers of climate change for decades — so
why are oil and gas companies still drilling for crude as if there’s no
tomorrow? There’s no simple answer. But any explanation would have to
give some credit to the wizards of public relations. For more than a
century, these spinmasters downplayed misdeeds, twisted facts, and
cajoled the media into mimicking their talking points.
“A lot of what we have as PR today, in general, was built in service of
the fossil fuel industry,” said Amy Westervelt, the host of Drilled,
billed as “a true-crime podcast about climate change.” The first season
of Drilled investigated the history of climate denial, and the second
looked at the West Coast crabbers suing Big Oil for contributing to
warmer oceans and throwing the marine food web out of whack. In the
latest season launched last month, Westervelt introduces the “Mad Men of
Climate Denial” — the publicists who coached the fossil fuel industry
how to shape public opinion over the past century.
Creating a cloud of confusion around established science is one of their
well-known tactics. Exxon and the coal industry knew about global
warming as early as the 1960s; instead of telling the public, they
spread doubt about the science behind it. That’s just one facet of the
fossil fuel industry’s propaganda machine. (“Propaganda” might seem too
strong of a word, but Westervelt says it’s the very definition: “a
one-sided message with the aim of shifting public opinion or policy.”)
Digging through archives, presidential libraries, and old PR books,
Westervelt found the pushy executives, manipulative schmoozers, and
“inventive” storytellers who made it work.
“People are largely unaware that there’s a massive system running
underneath everything,” Westervelt said in an interview with Grist. “A
lot of the ideas they have about the fossil fuel industry and even the
language they use has been crafted very carefully by the industry itself.”
She takes us on a wild journey from a turn-of-the-century massacre in
Colorado coal country to the messaging strategy of, yes, Nazi Germany,
telling the stories of the people who worked to boost oil’s image and
how their experiences taught them to influence the media, politicians,
and the courts. Here are just a handful of the wild strategies they came
up with, all still in use.
Fake news: “Fake news” proliferates on the internet today, a plague of
modern life with a long pedigree. You can trace it back to Ivy Ledbetter
Lee, often called the father of modern public relations. In the early
1900s, Lee was tasked with rehabilitating the public image of the tycoon
John D. Rockefeller. His company, Standard Oil, had brutally stamped out
a workers strike at a Colorado coal mine in 1913, setting tents on fire
and spraying their camp with machine guns. Lee crafted a story to smooth
things over, claiming that the strikers were actually plants hired by a
labor union, and that the whole thing had been orchestrated by Mother
Jones, a famous labor organizer (he also made up that she ran a nearby
brothel). “What are facts anyway but my interpretation of what
happened?” Lee said later on.
Corporate philanthropy: Lee’s coverup went so well that Rockefeller kept
him on board for the rest of his life. In addition to inventing the
press release (imagine, the newspaper prints your version of the story
word for word!), Lee prodded Rockefeller to donate to charitable causes,
like museums, to burnish his reputation. The approach gained traction as
other robber barons realized that they, too, could be remembered as
kindly philanthropists. The arts are now soaked with oil money — and
with their names emblazoned on art museum walls and festivals signs,
corporations get a similar reputational boost.
Astroturfing: What better way to counter grassroots activists than to
fake your own grassroots group? This practice, called “astroturfing,”
was the brainchild of Daniel Edelman, a PR whiz who advised Mobil Oil,
Big Tobacco, and many other companies in the mid-20th century. There are
now hundreds of fake front groups backed by oil-funded lobbying groups
like the Western States Petroleum Association, said Christine Arena,
former vice president of the firm Edelman (yes, named after Daniel), in
the podcast. They go by friendly names like “California Drivers
Alliance” or “Washington Consumers for Sound Fuel Policy.”
False equivalence: Herb Schmertz, who advised Mobil starting in the
1960s, took an aggressive stance toward the press. He’d attack any
journalist or outlet critical of his company, arguing that they weren’t
hearing Mobil’s side of the story, and then watch them overcorrect in
the next edition. The approach eventually expanded to demanding airtime
for climate deniers. One study looking at climate change articles in
major U.S. outlets between 1988 and 2002 found that more than half of
them presented climate science and fringe, Big Oil-friendly theories as
equivalent. “It took a while for newspapers to realize that this was not
a great way to go,” Westervelt said.
It seems like many in the media have decided to stop playing along. And
there are other signs that the tide is turning against the oil industry.
Once the world’s most valuable company, Exxon’s stock has dropped by a
third over the last five years, wiping away nearly $200 billion in
market value. Jim Cramer, the loudmouth host of CNBC’s Mad Money,
recently said that it’s time to ditch oil stocks. Even public relations
companies are now taking their services elsewhere.
“As soon as an industry starts to get an irretrievably bad image, the PR
folks start dropping off, and the industry has to find somebody else to
do this stuff,” Westervelt said. She said she has seen oil companies
turn to more obscure consulting groups, like FGI Consulting and the DCI
group, to do their PR work.
The fossil fuel industry is starting to move away from publicly denying
the facts about climate change (which isn’t working as well these days)
and back toward pro-oil, all-American messaging, like the new ads from
the American Petroleum Institute that tout oil and natural gas as
“energy progress.” If only Big Oil was as good at cutting greenhouse gas
emissions as it was at marketing.
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