How Big Oil Buys The News

On this week’s episode of Lever Time, David Sirota is joined by award-winning climate journalist Amy Westervelt to discuss her recent bombshell report on how news outlets are raking in millions from the fossil fuel industry to produce greenwashed sponsored content. 

Amy’s report reveals how outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Reuters, and Politico work directly with the oil and gas industry to produce branded “advertorials,” which straddle the line between advertisements and editorial content. While this financial arrangement raises questions about journalistic biases and conflicts of interest, what’s more troubling is that the majority of readers can’t tell the difference between sponsored content and genuine reporting. 

In today’s interview, David speaks with Amy about the history of branded partnerships between fossil fuel interests and the media industry, how actual climate journalists feel about this type of sponsored content, and how advertorials promoting carbon capture and clean hydrogen technology provide a smoke screen for expanding oil production. 

The two also discussed the annual United Nations climate summit, the latest being COP28, which has been slowly infiltrated and co-opted by the oil and gas industry in order to hamper any meaningful organization against climate change.

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Links:

• Leading News Outlets Are Doing The Fossil Fuel Industry’s Greenwashing (The Intercept, 2023)
• Drilled Media

BONUS: On Monday's bonus episode of Lever Time Premium, exclusively for The Lever’s supporting subscribers, we’ll be sharing David Sirota’s interview with Princeton professor D. Graham Burnett, who recently co-authored an op-ed for The New York Times about our ever-diminishing attention spans. Graham calls this  the “attention fracking” economy, when social media giants use manipulative algorithms to keep users’ eyes glued to the screen.

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