You usually have to specialize in the policy world, but I’ve been lucky enough to stay a generalist, able to work on and write about many different subjects over my career. I’m like a policy shortstop.
One of the reasons for that is that I just get frustrated when I see people (journalists, academics, politicians, and Internet trolls) discussing issues that they don’t understand and treating their word as the moral high ground. One issue where we always see this is climate change policy. While the discussion has changed and adapted over the years, the Left keeps using the same old dirty tricks we’ve seen for years.
Deceive, lie, and belittle. There’s no one better at doing that with the veneer of credibility than the New York Times.
In a recent report, climate reporter Hiroko Tabuchi attacked the Trump administration, ALEC, Big Oil, the Kochs, and Marathon Oil over an energy issue. That’s fine on the editorial page, but if a publication like the Times can’t keep hyperbole, scare tactics, and deception out of the news section, then our entire national debate on public policy will continue its downward spiral.
The offending article states that there was a “hidden beneficiary” to the Trump administration’s relaxing of certain air quality regulations. What I would have expected to follow that accusation (in an article that didn’t rely on deception) was maybe a reference to the black market of car inspections, maybe even an unexpected industry like window manufacturers. However, since the goal was hyperbole, if not outright deception, the article was actually referring to the oil industry. In fact, the report went directly after Marathon for wanting to relax the current policy.
The oil industry’s effort to shape policy is hardly “hidden.”
The article didn’t stop there. The reporter also calls the American Legislative Exchange Council, “secretive.” This is almost hilarious, but again we are talking about deception at a media outlet that many Americans hold in the highest regard. The New York Times shouldn’t aspire to be like Vox, HuffPost, Slate, or comparable midlevel partisan clickbait shops: The Times is supposed to be “the paper of record.”
ALEC is open about what it does. They post their model policies publicly on their website, and those policies have been written about and attacked relentlessly over the past several years.
Then the article tries to call the advocacy from the oil industry deceptive. The campaign was a product of the fuel and petrochemical manufacturers trade group, widely known as AFPM. However, neither the Facebook ads nor the site identified the industry group.
But the article is wrong again here. In fact, this one is so wrong that it truly is hilarious. If a website was trying to be deceptive, they wouldn’t list their sponsors anywhere. But, the Energy4Us.org website that ran the campaign the article would like to impugn does list their sponsors. Listed first (because of alphabetical order) is the same group that the New York Times’ report says wasn’t listed on the site at all — the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers.
We won’t even discuss what isn’t in the article that the New York Times hasn’t covered in the last couple of months — like lawyers financed by Michael Bloomberg using the power of state attorneys general to fulfill their advocacy goals, or like the amount of money that law firms are making/could make from climate litigation. Everything the Democratic Party does is welfare for lawyers.
At the end of the day, business is business. It makes sense that an oil company like Marathon would lobby Congress. They don’t make this effort a secret, and their lobbyists are registered with the government. It makes sense that a group exists to help state lawmakers. It makes sense that all of these groups would use all of the tools possible to fulfill their mission.
However, the New York Times would like you to believe the opposite, and they are definitely using all of their tools to deceive and mislead. They also don’t want to remind people that CO2 emissions are actually down in the U.S., despite the Bad Orange Man who’s been in the White House the last two years. Maybe if the New York Times weren’t being secretive about their mission then we could understand where they are coming from.
The only thing that is for sure is that they aren’t here for the journalism.
The New York Times is hurting its own reputation with this. It doesn’t matter where you stand on public policy in regard to climate. If we don’t get rid of the bias in what should be a credible outlet, then the likelihood of progress with the debate is zero. Deception might work for awhile — but just ask Madoff, Abramoff, or Cohen: It isn’t a good long-run strategy.
Charles Sauer (@CharlesSauer) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is president of the Market Institute and previously worked on Capitol Hill, for a governor, and for an academic think tank.
