What sort of ‘moment’ is this for Big Oil?

In the spring, a reporter from Unearthed, a journalistic project run by Greenpeace UK, went undercover. Posing as a recruitment consultant, they spoke with Keith McCoy, a senior lobbyist for the oil behemoth ExxonMobil, who told the “recruiter” that Exxon supports a carbon tax as a “great talking point” that won’t ever come to anything, that the company was actively seeking to water down President Biden’s climate policies—including via regular talks with the conservative Democratic senator Joe Manchin—and that it had used “shadow groups” to fight early climate science. (“There’s nothing illegal about that,” McCoy said. “We were looking out for our shareholders.”) Unearthed handed footage of the exchange to Channel 4, a British broadcaster, which put it on the air; in the US, where undercover journalism is more controversial (if not unheard of), major news outlets wrote up McCoy’s admissions as they drove outrage. Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, said that the tape “only proves our knowledge that the industry’s disinformation campaign is alive and well,” and said that he’d “ask the CEOs of Exxon, Chevron, and other fossil fuel companies to come testify before my Environment subcommittee.”

Yesterday, the CEOs of Exxon, Chevron, and the US division of BP, along with the US president of Shell and the leaders of the American Petroleum Institute and the US Chamber of Commerce, were called before the full House Oversight Committee to answer for the disinformation campaign. “This is a historic hearing,” Rep. Carolyn Maloney, the committee’s Democratic chair, said, before referencing the McCoy tape. “For far too long, Big Oil has escaped accountability for its central role in bringing our planet to the brink of a climate catastrophe. That ends today.” Not that it ended for long. Speaking next, Rep. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, dismissed the exercise as a distraction from Democratic malfeasance, before channeling his party’s typical deep concern for media ethics, calling the McCoy video “deceptively reported and edited,” so much so that it undercut the “legitimacy” of the entire hearing. (McCoy—whose comments to Greenpeace were publicly disowned by Exxon, and who has since parted with the company—spoke out about the video for the first time yesterday, telling Politico that it was “highly-edited.” He put the word “interview” in scare quotes.)

Related: Cover the COP26 climate summit like our lives depend on it

Like McCoy, the executives who testified yesterday stressed that they take climate change seriously, actually, and denied ever covering up any science. They also declined, when asked by top Democrats on the committee, to promise that they’ll stop funding lobbying efforts aimed at undercutting aggressive climate action. Rep. Byron Donalds, a Florida Republican, reassured the executives that “trying to get you to pledge on what you’re going to spend your money on is a gross violation of the First Amendment.” Rep. Katie Porter, a California Democrat, beamed in virtually and used two jars of M&Ms (one full, the other very much not) to symbolize Shell’s respective planned investments in fossil fuels and renewable energy, before opening a car trunk full of rice to quantify the amount of unused federal land that fossil-fuel companies occupy. Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, said “God bless Chevron.” Maloney said that the committee would subpoena documents from the companies, including around their payments to shadow groups. Comer objected, again citing the First Amendment. The hearing ended. The committee’s investigation continues.

That big oil companies knew about the climate harms of their products while working to obscure them was not a revelation of the McCoy video, of course: in recent years, outlets including the LA Times and Inside Climate News have reported on their denialism and brought the receipts. Big Oil is increasingly facing a swirl of commercial, political, and legal pressures: major fossil-fuel firms were denied the formal role they sought at the COP26 climate summit in Scotland, which starts next week; numerous lawsuits have been filed in a bid to hold the industry accountable. As Emily Atkin, of the climate newsletter HEATED, pointed out yesterday, the Oversight committee’s promised subpoenas might help on that front. Atkin also noted that the lawsuits resemble those that once hit the tobacco industry, and the broader Big Tobacco parallel was ubiquitous in coverage of the hearing, with much of it recalling the 1994 hearings at which tobacco executives claimed that nicotine is not addictive—a turning point on the road to regulation of that industry. (The timing of yesterday’s hearing added to what was already a busy moment for the phrase “Big Tobacco Moment.” Facebook is said to be in the midst of one, too.)

The comparison has its limits, however. As Hiroko Tabuchi and Lisa Friedman, of the New York Times, reported after the hearing, the oil executives present “seemed to have learned from the tobacco hearings” and stuck to a careful script. And, while the word “moment” conjures something fleeting, it’s easy to forget just how long it took to get to meaningful federal regulation of tobacco. The present political climate matters, too. The Republican antics at yesterday’s Big Oil hearing were hardly reflective of bipartisan agreement (and the Facebook example is emerging as evidence that even the latter does not equate to quick action). And, despite some weighty coverage, the hearing struggled to punch through a news cycle that was dominated, once again, by wrangling over Biden’s agenda.

This is itself a climate story, of course, even if the press hasn’t always covered it as one. Biden initially wanted to pass aggressive climate action as part of a bipartisan infrastructure deal, but it was watered down; a bigger, party-line spending bill was supposed to pick up the slack, but that’s been watered down, too, thanks in no small part to Manchin’s opposition to a provision that would have targeted fossil-fuel-dependent utilities with both carrots and sticks. (A carbon-tax proposal also went nowhere.) Yesterday, Biden laid out what he described as a compromise package that contained five-hundred-billion-plus dollars in climate spending, including incentives for utilities and transitional spending on electric vehicles. Various climate reporters and other observers pointed out that this would constitute both a historic investment in US climate policy and also a dereliction of duty; as the New Republic’s Kate Aronoff noted, the climate provisions in the package “would spend about half as much to confront a catastrophic, epoch-defining crisis each year as Americans spent on their pets in 2020.” And it’s not yet clear if the package will pass in its current form. The political media has some Manchin-watching still to do.

A meaningful “moment” for Big Oil—and in the wider fight against climate change—will require more concrete action than he and others are willing to countenance, and we should remember that in our coverage. It will also require media action beyond the sharp-reporting side of things. Many major media companies long since stopped taking ad dollars from Big Tobacco (though as Dan Kennedy has reported, some outlets have recently run ads from Philip Morris touting its smoke-free research). Some media companies—The Guardian, for instance—no longer accept fossil-fuel ads either, but on the whole those remain a comparatively common sight. As Atkin and Molly Taft, of Earther, reported this week, a trio of influential newsletters—Punchbowl, which covers DC politics, and energy-focused offerings from Politico and Axios—have collectively run more than fifty greenwashing fossil-fuel ads this month alone. Yesterday, the Axios energy newsletter covered the oil hearing under the heading “a critical day” and an eyeball emoji. The newsletter was “presented by ExxonMobil.” Eyeball emoji, indeed.

Below, more on the climate crisis and moments:

• “Our lives depend on it”: For Covering Climate Now, a climate-reporting initiative led by CJR and The Nation, Andrew McCormick urges news organizations to drop any triviality from their coverage of COP26. “Yes, there will be gaffes and oddball occurrences in Glasgow,” McCormick writes, referring back to some of the light-hearted coverage that relayed leaders’ quirky behavior at the G7 summit over the summer. “Some of them will be very funny. But even if a president is caught tugging on a locked door, even if Boris Johnson goes for a morning swim or jogging in his dress shoes, newsrooms must, for all our sake, keep focus on the story that matters most.”
• Whatever, the weather: This week, Fox launched a new ’round-the-clock streaming service covering weather. Executives pledged, in the face of widespread skepticism, that the channel would not ignore the climate crisis—but Eleanor Cummins watched its first six hours of programming, for the New Republic, and found the climate focus to be inadequate. “I saw storm-front reports, turbulence reports, school-day forecasts, a power outage tracker, expert advice on filing for homeowner’s insurance, viewer-created videos under the #FoxWeather hashtag, and plenty of Monday night sports banter—all slickly produced and often genuinely informative,” Cummins writes. “What I didn’t hear was mention of the scientific consensus that climate change is well underway.”
• Build Back Better: Also for the New Republic, Aronoff argues that the timing of Biden’s spending announcement gave oil and gas executives “a lot to be thankful for.” The news “left climate reporters—including yours truly—with a lot on their plate,” Aronoff writes. “It meant fewer people, perhaps, might see oil executives decline to commit to leave the API, which has spent some $500,000 on Facebook ads in recent weeks against electric vehicles and campaigned to weaken proposed constraints on the methane emissions in the gas industry. None of the CEOs who took the stand were even willing to criticize API for its continued efforts to block climate policy. After all, they fund those efforts.”
• Build Back Meta: In the aftermath of the Big Tobacco moment, Philip Morris changed its name to Altria Group. Yesterday, Facebook (the company) changed its name to Meta. (Facebook, the platform, will still be called Facebook.) Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook/Meta’s CEO, denied that the rebrand, which refers to his company’s ambitions in the metaverse (don’t ask), was inspired by recent bad publicity, but many observers were not convinced. Zuckerberg, Motherboard’s Jason Koebler wrote, “is pitching products that don’t exist for a reality that does not exist in a desperate attempt to change the narrative as it exists in reality, where we all actually live.”

A programming note, and an invitation: Two weeks from now, I’ll be writing this newsletter from inside COP26, reporting and commenting on the media stories surrounding both the conference and the climate crisis itself. If you or your news organization is headed to COP, I’d love to hear about your coverage plans (especially if you’re lining up something innovative) or just to say hi. If you aren’t heading to COP, I’d love to hear about what you’re looking for from others’ coverage of the conference, or any thoughts you may have on the state of climate journalism generally. You can reach me at jallsop@cjr.org.

Other notable stories:

• Tucker Carlson ignited a firestorm of criticism—from journalists, members of Congress, and even his own colleague Geraldo Rivera—after dropping a deranged, Infowars-style promo for a series about the insurrection that will stream on Fox Nation. Elsewhere, the editorial board of another Murdoch-owned outlet, the Wall Street Journal—which ignited a firestorm of criticism after running a deranged, Infowars-style letter to the editor from Donald Trump—defended its decision, calling Trump’s election lies “news” and knocking “the progressive parsons of the press” for trying to “censor” him. And HuffPost’s Christopher Mathias found that a man who claims to have attended the insurrection as a journalist for a “legitimate news organization” actually runs a white-nationalist website.
• Yesterday, Biden landed in Rome ahead of a G20 summit and a sitdown with Pope Francis. Parts of the latter meeting were scheduled to be broadcast live on TV, but the Vatican pulled the plug on those plans, citing the pandemic and offering to provide its own footage after the fact. “The Vatican has barred independent photographers and journalists from papal audiences with leaders since early 2020, even though external news media are allowed into other papal events,” the AP’s Nicole Winfield reports. Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, pledged to advocate for free media access.
• Last year, Amanda Bennett resigned as director of Voice of America after the Senate confirmed Trump’s choice of Michael Pack, a right-wing filmmaker, to run the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA and other US-funded broadcasters. The Post’s Paul Farhi reports that Biden is now keen to nominate Bennett to lead USAGM—but the idea has “begun to attract conservative criticism,” complicating her path to confirmation.
• A judge in Michigan dismissed charges against Daniel Debono, a Detroit police officer who fired rubber bullets at three photojournalists during racial-justice protests in the city last year. The judge cited a law that offers protections to officers policing unlawful gatherings, but prosecutors said that the protest had already been cleared by the time Debono shot the journalists, who in any case clearly identified themselves as press.
• Nieman Lab asked its readers to name the last news subscription they canceled, and why. “The No. 1 reason people say they cancel a subscription is money,” the survey found, “followed closely by ideology or politics,” a rationale that applied most often to the Times and the Post. Other reasons for canceled subscriptions included dissatisfaction with the quality of content, information overload, and customer-service issues.
• Off the Record’s Andrew Fedorov addressed “a hidden truth behind the Substack-driven newsletter boom”: that while writing one offers journalists a greater measure of editorial freedom, the workload is “absolutely exhausting.” The newsletter boom “was built on a promise of emancipation,” Fedorov writes. “But these pioneers soon found themselves forced to adapt to the rigors of the medium and readers’ expectations of constancy.”
• The Atlantic’s Yasmeen Serhan assessed the breathless French media coverage of Eric Zemmour, a far-right pundit and (still-unofficial) candidate in the country’s presidential election, comparing it to the outsized attention that Trump attracted ahead of 2016. “By over-indexing on a single candidate,” Serhan fears, “French journalists look doomed to repeat the mistakes of their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic.”
• In press-freedom news, India’s top court ordered an inquiry following claims that the government used spyware to surveil journalists and activists. Elsewhere, several journalists have been detained following a military coup in Sudan; supporters of the new regime have assaulted reporters and raided a news agency. And the Committee to Protect Journalists updated its Global Impunity Index, highlighting unsolved murders.
• And Rafael Morfin, the newsroom finance manager at the Post, has died of cancer. He was sixty-one. “When Rafael learned that most of the letters I got were hate mail, he began occasionally snail mailing me (anonymous) compliments and encouragement,” Ashley Parker, the Post’s White House bureau chief, recalled. “Later, his favorite thing was to ask about my toddler, and tell me about his grandson.”

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