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Michelle Amazeen, who studies advertising, journalism, and misinformation at Boston University’s College of Communication, recently noticed a marked shift in how major news outlets were talking about the energy economy, including the necessity of fossil fuels, the unreliability of renewables, and accountability for major oil and gas corporations. “It made me so mad,” Amazeen told me. “I was so shocked, and I didn’t have a good place to put it.” 

In March, as the United States and Israeli bombardment of Iran sparked a global energy crisis, Amazeen published an analysis of recent coverage on the website of Climate Action Against Disinformation, a coalition of climate-concerned organizations. She criticized the New York Times for quoting an academic without disclosing his oil company ties or mentioning that the paper accepts advertising revenue from the fossil-fuel industry. The war in Iran is “our latest reminder of the importance of independent, skeptical coverage of energy policy,” she wrote, “and it makes the commercial ties between newsrooms and fossil-fuel advertisers an urgent public concern.” 

Amazeen’s book Content Confusion, which came out in November, focuses on the evolution of in-house content studios and how native advertising—paid content that’s designed to resemble, and is often mistaken for, news coverage—is threatening journalism. She is at work on a study that examines native ads whose claims relate to the environment, energy, and sustainability. “Democratic deliberation depends on clear signals amid commercial noise,” Amazeen wrote in her recent analysis. “When energy security and climate policy are on the line, we cannot afford coverage that systematically downplays the political choices that create fossil-fuel dependence.” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

LW: Amid the war in Iran and Donald Trump’s supportive policies surrounding oil and gas development, what have you noticed about news coverage? 

MA: At the beginning of the year, the United States invaded Venezuela and took the Venezuelan president, and the news coverage was talking about oil, because in the end, it was all about oil. Many newsrooms are accepting the industry narrative that we’re going to need fossil fuels and that renewables aren’t reliable—that this is just “the way it’s going to be.” There doesn’t seem to be much pushback. There’s multiple things going on there. There’s the corporate influence, but then there’s also the acquiescence or obedience to the Trump administration. I think there’s real fear of drawing his ire. Everyone sees what he’s done with many of the broadcast stations, and we haven’t even talked about mergers and acquisitions. 

Around the same time, there was also coverage of the Supreme Court weighing in on the Chevron case in Louisiana, exploring whether the state could hold Chevron accountable. The Times coverage was quite “legalese,” and they only mentioned Chevron once. It almost seemed like they were protecting Chevron’s image. Whereas when they covered this back in April of 2025, it was much more aggressive, speaking to Chevron’s accountability. The tone was notably different. What happened in between the two articles was that the Times engaged in a native advertising campaign with Chevron. T Brand Studio, the content studio within the Times’ advertising wing, collaborated on a campaign for them, positioning Chevron as “problem solvers” and writing that we need them because there’s so much energy consumption—we need fossil fuels—and they’re innovative. I found that really problematic. There’s a perception that your news coverage is compromised if, on one hand, you’re trying to hold these people to account, yet they’re paying you to create stuff on their behalf.

You wrote about a Times article that was framed around the limitations and worst-case contingencies of the renewable industry in Spain, even though its solar and wind projects were hedging against the risks of the global oil crisis. Why did you choose to highlight that piece?

Again, I just turn back to the fact that they don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them. They’re in this active relationship with Chevron, and their article seemed to contain a lot of talking points that the fossil-fuel industry has been using. The Times article quotes a source who holds a British Petroleum–funded chair, and that’s not disclosed in the article.

Are there any other trends worth noting right now? 

There’s a group called the Propane Education & Research Council. They’re running native ads at the local level, in markets like small-town Iowa. It’s not content being created by news departments themselves. It’s being created externally, but they look like home improvement articles and enforce the idea that renewables aren’t reliable. That seems to be the theme, throwing distrust toward renewables and instead focusing on that narrative of always requiring oil and gas. 

In the past decade, we’ve seen the advent of beats and verticals dedicated to climate coverage, as well as entire outlets such as Inside Climate News and Grist. There are also organizations that support journalists with resources, like Covering Climate Now, which runs initiatives like the 89 Percent Project. Why do you think legacy media is still giving such a prominent voice to experts and advertisements from within the oil and gas industry? How can we upend that power dynamic? 

To answer both questions: money. The whole journalism business model is imploding.

Back in 1999, several major newspapers said they would no longer take money from the tobacco industry. But then in the spring of 2021, many of them created a native advertising campaign for Philip Morris International. So you can make these pledges, you can write them into your professional codes, but at the end of the day, if you don’t adhere to them, they’re meaningless.

The funding for newsrooms needs to be resilient to corporations and to politics. There are different versions of incentives that we can look at. You have places like Mother Jones that are strictly subscriber-supported. The Guardian has given up ads from the fossil-fuel industry. However, our public media in the United States hasn’t been that strong. The idea of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was noble in 1967, but now we’ve defunded it. Even within the last few years, the funding we’ve provided has only come down to less than three dollars per person, whereas in other countries, I think in some European countries, it’s around eighty or a hundred dollars per person.

There have been studies done—Victor Pickard comes to mind. He’s shown empirical data of the correspondence between funding for public media and the strength of democratic signals. So the countries with the greatest investment in public media have the strongest democracies, and the US is quickly falling behind.

What do you think needs to change in terms of how the journalism industry is regulated?

The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), as well as others, have hedged. The SPJ Code of Ethics, last updated in 2014, says to “distinguish news from advertising and shun hybrids that blur the lines between the two.” But then they also say: “Prominently label sponsored content.” So which is it? I think they need to drop that last sentence. 

The American Society of Magazine Editors says: “Regardless of platform or format, the difference between editorial content and marketing messages should be clear to the average reader. Advertisements that mimic the ‘look and feel’ of the print or digital publication in which they appear may deceive readers and should be avoided.” So why is it still there? 

The Federal Trade Commission’s initial 1967 statement was similar. These are all hedges. 

What should journalists do to better cover the current energy crisis? 

Newsrooms and journalists need to report without fear or favor. We’re at a point now where everything has become so blurry and everybody’s so confused about what they’re looking at, not to mention everything happening with generative AI and Polymarket and how they’re affecting news coverage. News organizations should be promoting themselves as the go-to source for legitimate information. It’s not a pink-slime outlet, it’s not some influencer; this is vetted, reported information. But I think it does complicate things when many news organizations are engaged in all this other deceptive content creation.

Journalists should take the Clean Creatives pledge, which states: “I will decline any future contracts with fossil-fuel companies, trade associations, or front groups.” Then you sidestep this whole problem. 

Can you tell me a bit about the Native Advertising Observatory? 

In collaboration with Dr. Geoffrey Supran at Miami University, I am creating a publicly available database where people can access native advertisements that the news industry has made on behalf of major fossil-fuel companies. We’ve been working on collecting the native ads. They’re not easy to find, because they’re not always marked, they’re not always labeled, and they’re not all in one place on a news site. Some of them don’t use consistent labeling, so we look for labels, sometimes within the URL. We’re starting with the fossil-fuel industry, but we’d like to expand it to see what other industries are saying about climate. We’re also continuing to look at how native ads affect public perceptions and audience behavior. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. We’ve made these choices as an industry, and we can make different ones. It won’t be easy, but the moment to act is now.

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