Source: Subscriber Post: Sneak Peek at New Research
How the Media Greenwashes the Fossil-Fuel Industry
By Amy Westervelt (Drilled) and Matthew Green (DeSmog), with additional reporting from Joey Grostern (DeSmog)
As she begins a recent episode of the podcast “Powered By How,” award-winning journalist Nisha Pillai talks about the difficulty of scaling innovation, then introduces her guests: a business psychologist, a renewable energy investor, and the head of an innovation lab. The guests go on to describe the complexities of climate change, the challenges to scaling any sort of technology, and what’s needed to engineer real solutions.
It sounds like any other business or energy podcast, but each episode in this eight-part series is actually an ad. The casual listener could easily miss the first 5 seconds, set to jangly, stereotypically podcast-y music, when Pillai, a former BBC World News presenter whose voice instills instant confidence, announces that this is a podcast from Reuters Plus in partnership with Saudi Aramco.
Pillai never explains that Reuters Plus is the internal ad studio at Reuters, not part of the newsroom. Nor does she remind listeners of the show’s sponsor when the head of the innovation lab, an Aramco executive, trots out the fossil fuel industry’s favorite line on climate: “We need to have collective action from all: government, industry, the developer of the technologies and the end consumer.”
Reuters is one of at least seven major news outlets whose internal brand studio creates and publishes misleading promotional content for fossil fuel companies, according to a new report released today. Known as advertorials or native advertising, the sponsored material is created to look like a publication’s authentic editorial work, lending a veneer of journalistic credibility to the fossil fuel industry’s key climate talking points.
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