When Craig Newmark started sending announcements of community events to his email group in the Bay Area, he could not have imagined it would come to this.
That email list turned into Craigslist, which changed not only the way we buy and sell second-hand goods, but the way we get our news as well.
Craigslist destroyed the classified ad market, which, with help from the Internet, put 400 newspapers out of business and 40 percent of the nation’s journalists out of work in less than a decade.
Newspapers responded by outsourcing state government coverage to bureaus and investigative reporting to privately funded, advocacy-driven organizations. And not surprisingly, it’s beginning to look as if the advocacy has begun to get in the way of the journalism.
Exxon Mobil — and now even some traditional journalists — think so. The Los Angeles Times ran a series on the petrochemical giant, alleging it knew about the damaging effects of global warming for decades but stopped talking about it, then sponsored skeptics who attempted to fight the consensus, all in an attempt to preserve value for its shareholders.
Eric Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, followed up by announcing he was investigating Exxon Mobil for downplaying to investors the risks of global warming and the threat it posed to Exxon Mobil’s business.
The Los Angeles Times was a logical home for this story, having been the first paper in the country to ban comments that questioned global warming orthodoxy. But it did not produce the stories on its own. They came from a team of graduate student reporters at the Energy and Environment Reporting Project at Columbia University.
The team, led by a hard-left professor named Sandra Rust, gets its money almost entirely from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which has a record of enmity toward the energy industry. Not even the Los Angeles Times knew about the funding when the first story ran, but it included a note about it in the second.
Moreover, at about the same time, InsideClimate News hit Exxon Mobil on a lot of the same points. Steve Coll, dean of Columbia’s journalism school and former managing editor of the Washington Post, put this all down to coincidence. But InsideClimate News, it turns out, is merely the arm of a lefty green public relations firm that gets its money from — wait for it — the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
Exxon Mobil does not intend to take this lying down. In a hard-hitting letter to Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, Exxon Mobil alleges the Columbia team cut a few corners in its zeal to slay the energy giant and asks for a meeting to “discuss the possible remedies available to us.”
The firm said the L.A. Times stories were “inaccurate and deliberately misleading” about Exxon Mobil’s activities and that the team and Rust had rebuffed numerous attempts to set the record straight even though the stories were based on documents it provided.
The letter ticked off a number of examples of reports provided by the company being misrepresented or deliberately misconstrued. It alleged one of the reporters misrepresented who she was to get interviews and that other quotes from Exxon Mobil officials were either inaccurate or made up.
These are heavy allegations that, if true, could be legally actionable themselves.
At the very least, they could cost Columbia something of its reputation and what has been a productive donor relationship with Exxon Mobil, which gives the university in the low six figures every year and hires many of its graduates.
So, in other words, a classic hit piece on a donor to the university funded by an enemy of the industry and presented by one of America’s largest daily newspapers as objective news reporting. And a website that repeats the same allegations is a product of a PR firm funded by the same lefty environmental group.
And it gets worse. It fell to Coll to address complaints the school’s journalists had reported and written inaccurate and misleading articles on Exxon Mobil. Coll is the author of the anti-Exxon book Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power. He called the assignment to go after Exxon Mobil an extension of his own research, which could hardly be considered objective.
Today, a Billionaire’s Club of lefty environmental activists, including everyone from Tom Steyer to George Soros, is funding these investigative reporting units. They provide enough to do the long-form, research-intensive journalism that today’s newsrooms simply can’t produce.
Even the Associated Press, the gold standard of ‘just-the-facts-ma’am’ journalism for more than 100 years, has developed partnerships with many of these groups. That means America’s smallest dailies – and many in the medium and larger markets – rely on these projects as well.
Newspapers, starved for cash and content, eagerly reprint these reports with little or no fact-checking on their parts. This advocacy “journalism,” paid for by sworn enemies of the industry being reported on, is passed off as factual.
Let’s hope this serves as a warning call for the newspaper business. Beware of greens bearing gifts. The Los Angeles Times no doubt enjoyed the opportunity to skewer an energy giant without devoting any precious resources to the task. But it may yet come to rue the day it accepted this freebie.
Brian McNicoll, former senior writer for The Heritage Foundation and director of communications for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, is a conservative columnist based in Reston, Va. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
