Of course, a lot of the ads for fossil fuels in news outlets do acknowledge the climate crisis, but only so they can misrepresent the commitment of fossil fuel companies to address the problem. They downplay climate impacts, painting oil and gas companies as working really hard to draw down emissions, which scholarly research shows is just another kind of propaganda.
One ad created by The New York Times' ad division, T Brand Studio, paints Shell as devoted to reducing emissions in the transportation sector; another ad glowingly describes ExxonMobil as researching algae and other biofuels. And in that paid post designed to look strikingly like an opinion column, the WP Creative Group, The Washington Post's branded content studio, allowed the president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute — again, an oil lobby — to claim that the fossil fuel industry "will play an essential role in building a sustainable and achievable energy future."
In a statement to Teen Vogue, a New York Times spokesperson says, “Advertising, including advertising from T Brand Studio, is clearly labeled, entirely separate from our newsroom, and plays an important role in helping to fund our independent journalism and the continued expansion of our coverage on the biggest stories of our time, including climate change, across a breadth of analysis and formats. All advertising must meet our advertising acceptability guidelines." (Teen Vogue has also reached out to T Brand Studio, the WP Creative Group, API, Shell, ExxonMobil, and The Washington Post for comment.)
Well. In reality, the API has spent tens of millions of dollars to lobby against climate policy in Congress. And though they do have small research groups studying clean-energy technologies, fossil fuel companies’ clean-energy investments accounted for only about 1% of their total capital expenditure in 2020, according to a report from the International Energy Agency. But their investments in finding new pockets of oil and gas actually rose 6% in 2019 and are expected to rise by about 10% in 2021, per the report. In other words, instead of focusing on ways to replace fossil fuels, oil and gas companies are finding ways to extract more of them.
So, news outlets are enabling oil and gas companies to misrepresent themselves, spreading "fake news" in their advertisements — and they are using the credibility of their journalism to do it. The better the climate journalism, in particular, the more believable the misleading claims in the ads will be. According to the attorneys general of multiple states who are bringing criminal cases against the oil and gas companies, these claims are part of the companies' attempts to defraud the American public on climate. Some of the exhibits in these cases are the very advertisements written by the ad agencies of the Post and the Times.
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October 18, 2021 at 07:01PM
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Fossil Fuel Branded Content Is a Form of Climate Denial and Propaganda - Teen Vogue
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