Newsletter: Forget the "Joe Rogan of the Left," Where's the Rupert Murdoch?

Information Pollution: A Primer

 [00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to Drilled. I am Amy Westervelt. In this season, we are going chapter by chapter of a great new book that pulls together all of the social science that we have so far-- peer reviewed social science -- on climate obstruction globally. It's called Climate Obstruction, a Global Assessment.

It's been pulled together by the Climate Social Science Network at Brown, which includes hundreds of social scientists working all over the world on trying to understand this issue. Today we are digging into a subject that is near and dear to my heart, the role of PR and media in climate obstruction.

And to do that, I'm joined by two people who have been guests on this show before. Melissa Aronczyk at Rutgers University and Max Boykoff from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

We had a great conversation about the role that media plays, both in helping to shape the public's understanding of climate and therefore the role it can play in obstruction, especially if it is targeted by bad faith actors, which it often is.

It was a super interesting conversation. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. That's coming up right after this quick break.

 My name is Max Boykoff. I'm a professor here in Environmental Studies and a fellow in the Cooperative Institute for Research and Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder in the us.

 I am Melissa Aronczyk. I'm a professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University in New jersey.

 So, I've probably talked to both of you about this separately before, but, it does seem to me that the media often avoids responsibility for climate obstruction or for playing any kind of a role in it.

I think you show really clearly here how it's kind of been used as a tool. So I wanna kind of start by having you explain how particularly the weaponization of this journalistic norm of balanced reporting has contributed to the disparity between scientific consensus and the public's understanding of [00:03:00] climate change.

 Yeah, I'm happy to start us off if you'll allow me to back out just a little bit to answer that question. I think if we look back through time, we, can track and our group. The Media and Climate Change Observatory has done this where we've tracked media coverage of climate change over time, and it really came into public consciousness and into the news starting in the late 1980s.

And, um, when that was happening, it was a new story to tell and there were a lot of different, uh, journalists and actors trying to make sense of what was going on and how to tell these stories. And as time went on though, there was, you know, in the late 1980s was the establishment of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

There was increasing understanding within the scientific community that humans contribute to climate change. And so from that period of time journalism as we've tracked it through various studies, had tried to make sense of that.

And [00:04:00] as they did that and as they started to draw on expert voices and others to give them a sense of where, science was on human contributions to climate change, journalists leaned back into their journalistic norms, including the journalistic norm of balanced reporting, which is to get one perspective, to get another and help the reader, the viewer, the listener, make sense of what's going on.

And so some early research that I had done with my brother Jules Boycott, who's at Pacific University in Political Science, we had just taken a look at how had US Media been covering it from that time in the late 1980s through, at that 200 two, when we finished up the study. And while there had been that convergent agreement in the scientific community.

And that had been communicated clearly through the intergovernmental panel on climate change assessments that we had found that the journalistic community had continued to tell this quote unquote balanced story. And, and in so [00:05:00] doing had perpetrated an informational bias and actually skewed the conversations, uh, in the public arena.

And, you know, part of the reason that we make those claims and then others have also been looking at this over time, is that, you know, quite frankly, people don't pick up peer reviewed literature. The IPCC assessment reports, they rely on news coverage to help make sense of what's going on around them.

And so news become this important bridge and this powerful driver of public conversation.

There has been a learning going on, a maturation or just sort of an integration of new understanding within the journalistic community. So we had put out that study, it actually gained traction. Um, it ended up in Al Gore's and Inconvenient Truth just briefly mentioned.

So it got a lot more attention and journalists, some were very eager to think carefully and recalibrate how they're telling these stories through, um, their own [00:06:00] reporting. Others, you know, weren't quite as, receptive to that messaging and critique. But nonetheless, you know, we did some follow-up work years later and found that that coverage had improved it, you know, when we looked it's with, another collection of.

Researchers here led by Lucy McAllister. When we looked at it again in 2021, we found that there had been tremendous improvements in US press, along with uk, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand, um, newspapers. But there it still isn't a hundred percent. And so, you know, the way in which we went about it to look at the unit of analysis being each newspaper article, we can still see there's room for improvement.

But if somebody's picking up the paper and reading a very influential piece that, that isn't accurate, that is still, falling, whether unwittingly or wittingly to, this sort of quote unquote balanced reporting that they themselves then start to get a skewed view still to this very day.

 Yeah, I don't know if [00:07:00] I've, um, ever told either or maybe both of you this story, but I had, I had this experience directly with, um, I was a stringer at the Washington Post for a while and like, because of where I lived, that meant covering a lot of wildfires. And, um, I went, I covered a fire once and the Cal Fire Chief told me, give me this like, very simple explanation for why fires were burning for so much longer now than they had. And this was, I mean, this wasn't that long ago. This was probably like 2015 ish. And um, and he said, you know, you know, are you from California? I said, yes. And he said, well, you probably remember when you were growing up that you would like go to bed at night and a fire would be 20% contained and you'd wake up in the morning and it would be like 60% contained or, or at least 50.

And I said, yeah, that was, that was the norm, you know? And he said, yeah, that's how it used to work. Because it would get cool and humidity would increase at night. And now that doesn't happen anymore. So these fires are burning. The same [00:08:00] intensity 24 7. And that's why they're getting so big and that's climate change.

And I was like, wow, what a great, like, simple way to understand that. And I put it in the story and my editor, who at the time was the national editor of the Washington Post, um, suggested taking out the part where he said, that's climate change because, and his comment was, this is a wildfire story, not a politics story.

 I said, I it like I'd been a climate reporter for a long time. So I like, knew enough to kind of push back on that and say, well, you know, that's an industry talking point. There's nothing political about what he's saying, you know, and he let, he like, you know, listened to me and let me keep it in. But the average person that's just like getting sent off to, you know, cover a flood a fire is not necessarily gonna feel confident, you know, saying.

You're wrong. It's not political, but like, you know, I don't think that that guy was being hounded by Exxon every day. It was just like so ingrained in [00:09:00] him that like, I don't know. I think of it every time I think about this 'cause its such, it was such a simple way that that stuff like creeps in.

 yeah. Yeah. Anyway, um, okay. So obviously the media is not coming up with this stuff on their own, what entities are working to serve up misleading climate narratives to the media or ensure that, people who are like spokespeople for the industry or who carry water for them in their ideas are given a voice in the media.

 Well, are you asking Amy about public relations firms, ad agencies

 like the, the like broad ecosystem of like people that are approaching the media with these narratives or talking points I would think of PR firms, maybe like internal PR folks at companies. Think tanks I think are doing a fair bit, you know, [00:10:00] that whole ecosystem.

 well, one thing we need to think about is the network of influence that's really something that has taken us a while to really get our thinking around. And, I think, you know, we're still finding connections that we didn't really know existed, which is kind of amazing. At least since the 1970s, we have started to see connections among not just media platforms and, people who set the agenda in the media, but think tanks, research centers, private donors, lobbyists and lawyers, PR firms. We are starting to get better and better evidence of this network, and both journalists and researchers are uncovering just how far back these relationships of denial go. But I do think it's also important to [00:11:00] remember that we're, you know, all of those groups I just mentioned operate in society and that society in general.

And really, you know, if we just, again, zoom out from fossil fuels per se and just look at our entire consumer society, uh, the way our lifestyles are set up right now, , the status quo is, is one in which fossil fuels play a very big role. And it's very hard for people to imagine alternatives, uh, especially when we don't see a lot of presentation of those alternatives in public communication. So it's, it's a very vast and really has been for a long time, very intractable problem that we've been trying to, to work through.

 Yes, definitely. I mean, we can draw links directly from, through the structures of, from who owns a lot of the corporate media.

 Um, but then also as you're mentioning Melissa, just the, the pr the [00:12:00] way that these firms are so influential, the way they play roles in the network, developing strategy. We really get immersed if you're watching commercial television just with all kinds of, uh, marketing and imagery and, and assertions that can at times be seen as, as greenwashing.

But then on, on top of that, you know, at, at the very core. We don't, you know, we're primed to fall into this because we've got a lot of other things that we wanna, um, focus in on. We don't wanna have to worry about it. And so when this sort of apparatus, when it flows through courses, through the veins of our lives, we take it, we're ready for it.

We just say, all right, let's, let's, um, focus in on other things. And so, uh, this apparatus gives us that opportunity to not have to face it.

 it. Yeah. You mentioned four key contrarian viewpoints that are amplified by the media, and I wonder if I could have you name those and talk [00:13:00] about how you, or the research that you were looking at, honed in on those four.

 Yeah, one, one really influential source for thinking about these four viewpoints, these kind of arguments for climate delay comes from the scholar, William Lamb and collaborators. It's in the academic journal, global sustainability, and it's, it's really become a go-to source for a lot of us. I, they have this fantastic chart, which summarizes the arguments, so it's, it's very useful.

So, um, the first, argument for climate delay is to suggest that someone else should take actions first, so in other words, redirecting responsibility for the problem away from themselves, which in this case would often be a fossil fuel company onto somebody else. So the classic one is suggesting that consumers themselves, individuals themselves. Should take actions to address climate change, you know, recycle, for instance. The second argument has to do with [00:14:00] saying that we can't mitigate climate change. It's simply not possible. You have to just kind of give in to the fact that it's never gonna happen. You've seen a lot of arguments like that, especially by, climate deniers saying, you know, change is, is just impossible.

We can't change our current way of life. Um, we can't do that. Or saying it's basically a catastrophe and, you know, doom and bloom apocalypse there, there's nothing to be done. There's a third argument, which is actually a little more insidious where, fossil fuel companies will push non transformative solutions.

That's how, lamb and his collaborators put it. And you know, this one's insidious because it seems like solutions are just around the corner. But in fact, these solutions are very problematic and often, really backwards. One would be to say, future technologies are gonna solve the problem. So, you know, we don't have to worry now because in the future we'll have AI solving climate change.

You know, these kind of very vague, very always future [00:15:00] focused ideas for how the problem will be solved. Another one is to say you can't restrict or regulate companies because then they won't be able to come up with solutions for climate change. So you have to kind of give them time to figure it out. Yet again, this future facing solutionism. Again, these are problematic because they seem like, back to what Max was saying a moment ago. They, they seem to make us feel better and they make us feel like we don't have to do anything that, you know, companies have it.

It's kind of the opposite from the redirect responsibility frame. Anyway and then the last one is about, emphasizing all of the problems with the solutions that are being proposed that are viable. So for instance, you've got a solution in mind, which involves. Social justice. But you know, that means that vulnerable members of our society might have to bear the brunt of, the solutions. So we can't do that. We need solutions [00:16:00] that, that work for everyone, otherwise we shouldn't have solutions at all. So these discourse types, so to be fancy, shows this tendency among, um, actors of disinformation to actually move away from overt denial.

Like moving away from saying climate change isn't happening, it's not real. And having more subtle tactics to just undo or, um, delegitimate climate solutions just by saying that they're not gonna work for a variety of reasons.

 It could be a good opportunity to, just to point out that Melissa and I were leading on this, this chapter where we were essentially pulling together a lot of the current research to help us understand how this discourse is being steered through news, social media, advertising, public relations, and we led on this chapter, but Trav, Trav Cone, may Lawson, Hannah Morris, and Chris Russell also contributed to this.

So as a great opportunity for [00:17:00] us to pull together this kind of research from William Lamb and colleagues and others to help provide a bit more of a cogent picture.

 Yeah. Yeah. I love that study, the graphic that they made. It's so simple, but like, it's so helpful. Okay. So, uh, you mentioned social media there. Obviously the media itself has gone through, quite a few pretty big transitions over the last couple decades. How have those transitions contributed to the ability of corporations and PR firms and these other entities that you've mentioned, , to really kind of hijack the narrative even more, or, push even legacy media to kind of amplify these sorts of talking points.

 Well, it will be no surprise to anyone if I say that in the Western Hemisphere, at least in the global North, our media are in crisis, especially news media [00:18:00] and even more in trouble are legacy news media such as, uh, radio and newspapers, which are dealing with economic and political crises, as well as extreme political polarization, which has shattered the sense among a lot of the public that our news outlets provide fact-based and reliable information. That's kind of the current picture, but it has been quite a while now that oil and gas producers and their collaborators have actively worked with both legacy news and social media platforms as well as PR firms and advertising agencies to promote disinformation, that obstructs climate policy. Um, max talked about the news balance, but we've also seen how oil and gas companies do source building with journalists to promote, uh, their industry point of view [00:19:00] and news coverage. Um, but then of course we also have social media where there's less of an intermediary or gatekeeping function. So oil and gas companies can pretty much post whatever they want. Um, not to mention, you know, blogs, instant messaging. And because our mainstream media is. Under corporate control. And because their business model needs advertising revenue to stay afloat, it has also become harder and harder for news to remain separate from promotional content. Um, I don't, you know, there's even more we could say, we talk about this in the chapter for the book.

We have these newer kinds of threats with emerging digital technologies and social media, because now disinformation campaigns can operate at a massive scale and scope. They can target, certain groups much more precisely. You have technology companies and their platforms that let [00:20:00] powerful actors shape information in ways that lack accountability. On top of everything else, we have the explosion of artificial intelligence, which is changing by the day and is incredibly difficult to detect and predict, not to mention the environmental costs of ai, use the, the energy consumption generated by ai, the waste generated by AI systems, uh, especially data centers, which contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and environmental pollution.

So we've got like a, I was gonna say a triple threat, but I think this is like a octoPal threat.

 Yeah, there are definitely several dynamics that play in there pointing in discouraging directions. I mean, as you've pointed out, Melissa, that there's been increasing consolidation. Some of the media mergers and acquisitions and everything that are going on, just kind of feel beyond us as everyday people.

Skydance is merging with Paramount and what does that mean for Colbert and what does that mean for the news? I get it's getting [00:21:00] just, uh, bigger and bigger all the time. As we look around, we can see that our local independent news are strained. Just some of the recent decisions from the Trump administration, um, have put even further strain on these news sources.

And so we've, across this country, across the world, we've got many news deserts. So people are increasingly reliant on these corporate media sources to make sense of what's going on in the world. And that's through legacy media. As Melissa's pointed out. Once you get into social media, it gets even more confusing with algorithms and, and the blending.

Even some of your work, Amy has, has found its way into our chapter where you've pointed out this confusion that can take place between straight news reporting and some advertising that's going on, from these carbon based industry, uh, players. And so while there are definitely a lot of dynamics at play, it's discouraging and challenging.

 Yeah, I wonder if you've looked at or if there's any [00:22:00] research yet, or if it's maybe too early on this around the way that influencers are sort of replacing reporters.

Like I see this all the time, even I have an intern right now who, who's like, do you know this guy? Blah, blah, blah. I get all my news from him and I looked him up and he's like, one of these people who sort of reads headlines, in videos, which is all well and good, except that like if those people end up getting all the funding and all the audience, then there won't be any reporters.

Writing the stuff for them to read anymore, you know? I just see this huge shift in I guess like the credibility that people are ascribing to influencers for what appears to be no rhyme or reason. It's not like these people are like, Hey, listen to me.

I'm very credible for these reasons. It's just like some random guy. Anyway, yeah, I don't know if, if you [00:23:00] guys have looked at that, but it's freaking me out.

 I, you know, that problem first became really clear to me when I was teaching an undergraduate class on media and politics a few years ago, and we had this assignment that I gave them where I said. The student had to identify the source of the media they were looking at, and their answers were things like Facebook

or, well, probably not Facebook, because no, nobody under the age of 25 looks at Facebook, but you know, social media we're, we're listed as the source for these students. And I said, no, no, I don't mean where you saw it. I mean the original source. And they really didn't know what I was talking about. And that's when it hit me that the way our media platforms are organized, the way we access information online is really not the way we, people of my generation used to access or understand it. So the source is not [00:24:00] nearly as relevant to younger people, uh, as the content itself and the way it's presented so that, you know, if we're talking about a space where influencers come to have a lot more. Credibility that really does have to do with what's getting put in front of people. And that in itself has to do with how algorithms work, um, and how prior usage patterns work and how, the location of the individual works.

We, we know about all of these data points that inform what kind of information is, is put in front of people. And so an influencer who might have gotten your attention at some other time for some other completely different topic, suddenly seems like somebody much more reliable and trustworthy than a source you don't know. And that proximity in time and

is Really problematic when it comes to information about complex scientific.

and highly polarized [00:25:00] issues like climate change.

 Yeah, I'm finding that too with students. I work with my kids as they're getting older. You know, they'll say, oh, news sources is, uh, news sources, is YouTube news sources is TikTok.

 And, um, so my, my experiences have been similar and that's a demographic shift that, that we ought to be talking more about. Um, but on top of that, I'd say relevant to, you know, what, what we're talking about here as well is that there's been documentation that now oil companies have been hiring these TikTok influencers, court young people. They are the pathways forward. And, and so the savvy PR firms, advertising firms, carbon based industry actors themselves are getting into this. So what you're, what we're sensing together is definitely something that's deliberate and that is going on.

 Yeah. You had some really, really interesting references to new research around this, kind of [00:26:00] persistent intersection between a certain type of conservative identity and climate contrarianism. I know the first paper I ever read on that, that I still love, 'cause I think it's the funniest title ever, is the Cool Dude's Paper from mc Wright and Dunlap.

 But you have some really new stuff that's really interesting. I would love to have you guys just unpack that, and why this is such a persistent connection between this particular identity and climate Contrarianism,

 We do get into some of the contours of what's been developing more recently, newer research that, um, work. There's, there's a whole group of work by Riley Dunlap and Aaron Mccr that's been really influential and really pathbreaking, um, in the early days of getting a handle on who are these climate contrarians, what are their motives, how are they effectively obstructing climate action, climate [00:27:00] policy, action, greater engagement.

And when you refer to that, Amy, or the cool dudes piece just refers to maybe colloquially older white guys who are very influential in these spaces. And some of them, you know, are, um, micro blogging on Twitter, X, even blue sky and others Mastodon for a little bit there. They're, you know, sometimes maybe just sitting in their basements, in their comfortable suburban homes.

And, these folks demographically may not be at the forefront of climate impacts like many others. And so there's been research that's followed on theirs. I've done some myself where I've gone to the Heartland Institute meetings about a decade apart and sought to make sense of who they are, what are their motivations.

So that finds its way into our chapter. Another kind of layer of this is that we've, we've documented in this chapter a lot of good research that's been done, that's been tracking how it is much more evident and influential within certain countries with ties to fossil [00:28:00] fuel industry. Um, and. Reliance on fossil fuels.

Matthew Hornsey and colleagues have done some really good work that compares and contrasts these discourses across countries. So there's places like the United States where the belly of the beast in a certain way. Um, the UK, Australia, certain elements of Brazil around food consumption and fossil fuels, they have much more vocal and, um, I guess legible, audible, uh, climate contrarian groups, collections, which can be, you know, caca at times.

But the overall goals of distracting, delaying, denying the facts and the evidence around this. Uh, there are through lines there.

 Yeah, totally. I didn't realize there was actual research on this that amongst the developed countries or more developed countries, that the UK and the US really stand out as being places where media really continues to give a platform [00:29:00] to climate skepticism.

So again, I'd love to have you kind of talk about the research on that and share your thoughts on why that might be.

 I do think a big part. Of that, just, you know, again, I think we have to understand the background or the, the structural or systemic issue here. So I, I do think a big part of that has to do with the ownership structure of so many news outlets in the UK and the US and who's, so the question of who owns the media becomes really salient here. But another issue that affects the way we think about how the UK and the US stand out, uh, as giving a, a, a platform for skepticism is simply that there's a lot more research out there about the UK and the US than about other parts of the world. So it's not just that American and British media platforms enable skepticism, which they do, but that we know much more about it there than we do about what's going on in other places.

And I, I really wanna underline [00:30:00] that as a, a very big challenge when you are writing, uh, as we did for, as sorry, a contribution to this book, a global assessment of climate obstruction. It just, I think one takeaway that we had from working on this chapter was that we really need better and more sustained research all over the world to recognize how some of the climate skeptic frames and platforms and styles are being exported to other parts of the world, or how we are getting imported from other parts of the world, various kinds of climate skepticism, but we just don't know as much as we need to in, in some of parts of the world.

 Yeah, we've been working more and more with reporters in Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique, and especially in Uganda and Tanzania. I was really surprised at how much it had been like, really drilled into them. The, like very old school false equivalents thing, you know, of like if you quote a [00:31:00] scientist about climate change, then you have to talk to, I don't know, the government person in charge of petroleum contracts or something too, you know?

 Something that one of our co-authors, Mayana Lawson has been really focusing on that relates to this question, which is about how, um, emerging analyses of climate coverage in, places like Brazil might make few references to climate skepticism, but that could be because they're not focusing on fossil fuel emissions, but they are focusing on things like carbon pollution from agriculture or other land use practices. So I think that's just something else to keep in mind when we are talking about climate skepticism. It might, sometimes it, certain stories might fall outside of the purview of research on climate skepticism, but it, it is climate skepticism. It just might look different in the news piece.

 Yeah, Melissa, you make great points. And just [00:32:00] from referencing Mayana, that's, she's an example of, you know, she has been really influential in helping tell these stories out of Brazil. And, uh, we need many more researchers like Mayana and others to come together, um, so that we can tell these stories more comprehensively. So this book itself, you know, our chapter contribution to it, the larger project is trying to take a step forward in more systematically understanding how these dynamics play out in various, um, times and spaces and that, but it is stunning, you know, given the amount of funding and, capacity that there is within these PR agencies, within advertising, within news reporting, that that shapes the stories that we get on a daily basis, um, that we don't have a, a larger, more coordinated effort to understand all these dynamics from a social sciences perspective, from humanities and how that relates to the natural physical sciences.

 The most recent [00:33:00] IPCC report was the first to include social scientists and the first to really note this stuff as a huge blocker to policy action.

And Max, I know I've talked to you about this before, um, so I won't have you repeat like an hour's worth of stuff, but, I just am curious like why do you think it took so long for, the IPCC to start looking at this as part of the problem?

 Yeah, I think it is a good question. As we've grown to understand more about climate change, it's not a single issue. We're increasingly recognizing that it's a set of intersecting challenges that that flow through every aspect of our lives, meeting our livelihood needs and everything else. Um, and in so doing, we need to understand it from not just.

Physical, biological perspectives, but also human behavior perspectives. And there have been social scientists that have come on board and been a part of some of the [00:34:00] previous IPCC reports, but this really was a big step forward with some of us that were invited along. So I was a contributing, uh, author to that most recent IPCC report.

And so when you ask that question, I mean, I think the kind of simple answer is, um, because there were folks like me and me included to bring the very thoroughly researched work that. We're talking about this chapter in this larger book into the pages of the IPCC. Um, but I think a bigger part of that is just that more, uh, folks from different disciplines seeing this as an integrative interdisciplinary set of challenges are being invited in to help provide those insights through the thoroughly researched work that's going on out there.

And so it is a step forward. You know, they're, they're selecting authors for the next one. We could possibly debate for a full hour about the wisdom of another big assessment report years off, while we need to do a lot in the interim. But having said that, they're selecting [00:35:00] authors for the next one. I hope that continues to flow into these, um, pages and, and the work that, that we talk about in the chapter that we capture.

That's in the. Larger reports themselves actually didn't make it into the, the, um, summary for policymakers. And that too, we could talk about for quite a while. But there's still a lot of work to do to make this much more legible and to make this a larger conversation through the IPCC.

 Okay. Melissa, I feel like this gonna be your big question, which is about the, the PR firms, I love this description of them as sort of the, the glue joining carbon based industries, media organizations, and economic sectors using coalitions, campaigns and other coordinated processes to question the efficacy of science, news and political institutions engaging climate related issues.

Again, this is one I know you could. Spend, many hours talking about. But, can I have you give a little bit of an overview of the role that PR firms play here? And if you wanna [00:36:00] talk about advertising firms too, that's fine. Maybe the difference between them. 'cause I feel like they get conflated a lot.

Maybe there's not that much difference between them anymore. I dunno. Anyway, over to you.

 yeah. So the most important thing I learned when I started researching the role of ad agencies and PR firms in climate disinformation is that these firms are not just mouthpieces for their fossil fuel clients. They are coming up with the strategies. They are creating messages. They are developing the relationships with news media and other organizations who are friendly to their cause. For a long time, climate researchers only focused on the fossil fuel companies themselves, and that was relevant and necessary. So we now have a lot more information about what Exxon does or what Shell does, or what BP does. But lately journalists and researchers have started paying [00:37:00] a lot more attention to the consultants and strategists who come up with the positioning for these fossil fuel companies and who play key roles in managing these companies, media image and their marketing and strategic plan. I do wanna mention that there, there is a very important pioneer of this kind of research whose, uh, name is John Alber of the Center for Media and Democracy in Wisconsin. Um, he founded that center back in 1993 and in 1995. He wrote this book, which I think has the, the best name, uh, that any book like this could have, which is called Toxic Sludge is Good for You, which was an expose of the PR firms involved in environmental disinformation. And I I mentioned that 'cause that really was a, a very important guide that came out at a time when most of us were looking the other way. Um, it really has helped later researchers and journalists think about this topic. So a second [00:38:00] major finding that we have about the role of PR firms and ad agencies in climate disinformation is that these firms are embedded in a very wide ecosystem of influence.

We mentioned this a little earlier in our conversation, but just important to remember, PR firms and ad agencies are doing work for not only fossil fuel companies, but also their trade associations, industry councils, and science advisory council. For think tanks and research institutes, NGOs, foundations, chambers of commerce, organizational boards, I mean the list, the list goes on. And the important thing that really came to me is that these firms play several roles in keeping this network together. This is the glue part. Uh, one of the things that these PR firms and other consultants do is, uh, intelligence gathering across different industries as well as inside the [00:39:00] environmental community. So you'll have PR firms hiring people who used to work at government agencies working on environmental issues, or from other organizations that influence public policy on environment, uh, or climate and energy issues. Another thing these PR firms will do is conduct industry friendly research that help clients promote their viewpoints in the media. So there's a massive production of scientific material, legal material, and technical material to circulate in the media. So, like you said, Amy, I could really go on for several more hours about this, but I just really want to communicate that these, these firms are not just about spin. There's so much more going on and they, they deserve all of the attention that we've been trying to give to them over the last few years.

Transcription

Obstruction would never have been as effective as it has been without the help of the PR industry and the willful ignorance of the media. Today, Melissa Aronczyk, of Rutgers University, and Max Boykoff, of the University of Colorado, join us to walk through why getting a handle on the media's role in climate obstruction is critical to solving the problem.

, is available from Oxford University Press 

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Climate Obstruction

Information Pollution

S14, Ep4 | The Media As a Tool of Climate Obstruction

A true-crime podcast about climate change, hosted by investigative journalist Amy Westervelt. Listen here, or 

A true-crime podcast about climate change.

S14, Ep4 | The Media As a Tool of Climate Obstruction

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