The Washington Post Crossed a Line with Climate Stories Featuring Excerpt-Style Exxon "Ads"
Too often, the line between editorial content and Exxon advertising is being crossed in a paper that won a Pulitzer for its climate coverage.
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~ See 10/19 updates below - Post ad display has changed ~
The Washington Post exemplifies the best of climate journalism, as reflected in the Pulitzer Prize awarded to a team for the paper's 2020 coverage. The same goes for The New York Times (where I spent 21 years as a reporter and online commentator).
But both media institutions, more than ever, need to update their practices and policies when it comes to supporting all that great journalism through fossil-industry advertising.
The general issue is not new, as you'll read below. But a new trouble sign emerged as I clicked back to a couple of Post columns on paths to effective climate action. Both were interspersed with online ads designed to resemble highlighted article excerpts - sharply and deceptively blurring the line between editorial content and paid fossil advertising.
Here's one, floating in a 2020 opinion article by the journalist Lucia Graves and Ezra Markowitz, an associate professor of environmental decision-making at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, focused on (yes) the intersection of persuasive communication and public engagement with science and environmental sustainability. In midstream there's a classic pull-quote-style boldface quotation of a statement by an Exxon scientist.
Here's another, jarringly positioned in "I'm a black climate expert; racism derails our efforts to save the planet" - a powerful 2020 call to action by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, the climate-focused marine biologist, author and podcaster focused on climate justice.
Ezra Markowitz sent this reaction, which I'm putting in here as an actual pull quote:
“Regardless of intent, designing ads to look like pull quotes and placing them in content-aligned pieces seems very likely to mislead a significant number of readers. This is unfair to the authors and it’s unfair to readers as well. I hope this is a practice that we’ll soon see disappear."
Lucia Graves, Markowitz's co-author, added this reaction:
"I was disappointed that The Washington Post, a publication I have always revered and was honored to be published in, allowed Exxon Mobil to use our piece on the importance of climate-crisis communication as a vehicle for greenwashing their image. Exxon isn't just any oil company, it's the worst offender of exactly the problem my coauthor and I were writing about — a company that spent decades lying to the public to protect their bottom line, even though they knew the perils posed by climate change. I understand newspapers are in a difficult financial situation, but to run a greenwashing Exxon ad in a way that makes it look like a pull quote from our story is a bridge too far."
I reached out to the Washington Post's public relations office twice on Monday and will update this post if and when I hear back.
~ Insert 10/19, 5:50 p.m. ET~
Shani George, vice president for communications at the Washington Post, sent this explanation by email Tuesday afternoon:
"We work to ensure ads are clearly labeled as advertising and that disclosure was inadvertently left off in the ads you referenced. The ads have been updated and state that the content is from an advertiser."
~ Insert 10/19, 10 a.m. ET~
The Post public relations staff has not responded to my emails but if you click to the two commentary links above, the advertising display has changed. The Markowitz/Graves story now feature ads for Mass Mutual. The piece by Ayana Johnson now is surrounded by ExxonMobil ads, but at least they are clearly ad content. The ironies and questions still abound. Here's a before/after look:
~~
Before I go deeper, it's important to emphasize that the broader issues around news outlets taking fossil fuel money have been laid out in detail by journalists including Amy Westervelt and Emily Atkin and quite a few social scientists, particularly Robert J. Brulle.
It'll take awhile for major news outlets beyond The Guardian to end all such advertising. My focus here is more granular - about what news media can do promptly while they weigh bigger financial and ethical questions.
Simply put, the Post should stop publishing any in-article ads designed to resemble pull quotes.
Pull quotes, by long tradition, are story excerpts designed to add visual punch and amplify key passages. As Wikipedia's entry puts it, a pull quote is "a key phrase, quotation, or excerpt that has been pulled from an article and used as a page layout graphic element, serving to entice readers into the article or to highlight a key topic."
They are not there to say to readers, "Hey, here's a quotation that's been inserted into this story by an algorithm and designed to entice you to explore a company's feel-good message."
More issues
There's plenty more near-term work to be done by major media on this front.
I recently criticized The Times for creating advertising content that conveys far too cozy a relationship between the paper's heralded brand and those of fossil giants Shell and ExxonMobil, a company whose senior Washington lobbyist was taped describing efforts to hinder climate change action.
Read: j.mp/nytexxonads
When the paper does this brand blurring, as I wrote, "The energy companies are clearly benefiting from perceived affiliation as much as basic exposure."
Read my dispatch for The Times' response.
Shell and ExxonMobil, along with BP, Chevron and the American Petroleum Institute, are expected to testify at a hearing on climate disinformation scheduled by the House Oversight and Reform Committee for October 28.
Let's hope that the hearings dig in on how the ecosystem of information distortion too often includes the active role of the non-news side of news media companies.
The roots run deep, including in the history of The New York Times op-ed page taking advertising - a co-production process if ever there was one, as even the paper's advertising column noted in 1975.
My first Times byline, paired with an oil ad
It gets kind of surreal. A few years back, I noticed that my very first Times article, an opinion piece on oil and conflict written during the first Gulf War, was accompanied by a Mobil (now ExxonMobil) paid commentary:
Go deeper:
Amy Westervelt and Genevieve Guenther just co-wrote a compelling piece for Teen Vogue that is a must-read: Fossil Fuel Branded Content Is a Form of Climate Denial and Propaganda
My August 19 Bulletin dispatch centered on Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's push for accountability on fossil-industry disinformation: Exxon Beware - Students and a Senator Vow to Demolish Climate Inertia
The latest analysis of ExxonMobil advertising and lobbying messaging by Harvard researchers Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes: Rhetoric and frame analysis of ExxonMobil's climate change communications
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