How Oil Companies Manipulate Journalists

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The Drilled 2024 Guide to Climate Disinformation

Hot Take: Fixing Media Is a Climate Solution

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Is Big Oil Turning on Big Auto?

New Climate Case Names Enablers: API, Western States Petroleum Association, Koch Industries, and McKinsey

Fossil Fuel Industry Ads: You Can’t Live If Living Is Without Us

Disinformation Techniques: A Glossary

Herb Schmertz: The Bully

The Spin Masters: From Ivy Lee to Rick Berman

If you're going to do the job properly, you have to find unconventional ways to communicate to the public. It's not a question of convincing the press of anything. It's a question of convincing the public

Keeping with our “Mad Men” theme this season, Ivy Lee was the father of public relations, the Bert Cooper if you will, and Daniel Edelman was the Roger Sterling. He took Lee's foundation and spun it into a whole psy-opps operation, using a combination of human psychology and a bit of the old razzle-dazzle to schmooze legislators, trick the media, and keep big tobacco and oil clients happy. Herb Schmertz, that guy you heard up top, was the Don Draper. Slick and handsome, always with an expensive suit, he was the smartest guy in the room and mostly thought both journalists and other PR guys were idiots. Schmertz is the guy who really turned media into another propaganda tool for the fossil fuel industry. He ran P.R. for Mobil Oil from 1969 to 1988 and became a master of media manipulation. Schmertz didn’t just focus on placing particular stories, he set about fundamentally changing the relationship between corporations and the media.  To Schmertz, the press was more of an obstacle between him and the public, or Mobil and policymakers.

And to do the job properly, you have to really go around the press or beyond the press or against the press to get a story out so that the public focuses on it, not the press. If you're just going to limit yourself to getting the press to focus on that, you're not doing the entire job.

All of our Mad Men seemed to forever be just one step ahead of the press, and their ability to establish oil as such an essential part of American life that you couldn’t really question it … to the point where for a long time *journalists* didn’t even question it … is a big part of how it became so easy later to spread climate denial and delay climate action.

I’m Amy Westervelt and this is Drilled, Season 3: The Mad Men of Climate Denial

Oil industry PR began, in part, as a response to journalists--remember Ida Tarbell from our first two episodes? She wasn’t the only muckraker with the oil tycoons in her sights. By the time Schmertz came around, Ivy Lee and Daniel Edelman had definitely messed with the media’s minds, but  Schmertz, perhaps more than any of these guys, fundamentally changed the structure of media in a way that really opened up the floodgates to disinformation. He invented the advertorial, for a start. He also invented issue advertising, which is now the only type of advertising the oil industry does. You’d think all they do is farm algae and research carbon capture and worry about climate change if you only paid attention to their ads.

Schmertz also bullied journalists into covering Big Oil’s side of the story, and encouraged his peers to do the same. Which, sadly, worked really well. And he lobbied for corporate first amendment rights and against any media regulations that would make it harder for him to use the press as a tool.

Schmertz’s contributions to the art of spin are so vast, we’re going to bring you his story in two parts…. but like so many of the rest of our Mad Men this season, Schmertz began his career in military intelligence. And that’s where we’ll pick up.

Known during his heyday for dapper suits, cigars, and generally being something of a dandy, for the first half of his life Herb Schmertz seemed more destined to be Secretary of Labor than a famous PR guy. Unlike Ivy Lee and Daniel Edelmann, Schmertz started out as a lawyer, *not* a journalist.

After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1955, Schmertz was drafted into the Army.

The  Vietnam War was just beginning. Given his law background, Schmertz was sent straight to work in counterintelligence in Washington, D.C.

After two years there, it was back to law for Schmertz. Labor law, following in the footsteps of his older brother. Schmertz loved everything about the ocean and boats, so he quickly made his way into labor relations with dock workers. They tended to find his Ivy League background and tailored suits off-putting, but liked his straight-shooting and general aggressiveness.

In 1960 Schmertz signed on to work for JFK’s campaign.

He was a Democrat and an idealist and he helped the campaign with voter registration and reaching out to special groups, including labor and various ethnic communities in New York. As a thank-you for his campaign work, Schmertz was made general counsel for the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, a government agency tasked with mediating big labor disputes in the country. Four years later, Schmertz was back in private practice, but still consulting regularly for the government.

When longshoremen from Maine to Texas went on strike in 1964, it was Herb Schmertz that President Johnson called in for help.

When he went to work for Mobil, Schmertz was actually still working in labor. He handled the company’s labor relations for five years. But his background in law and political campaigning, combined with his relationships with various labor unions, made Schmertz an even greater, if unexpected, fit for the company’s public affairs office.

By this point, 1969, Rawleigh Warner was Mobil’s CEO. He wanted Mobil, which always seemed to be playing catch-up to Exxon, to be more of a visible player in the industry. Schmertz had a lot of ideas on that front, starting with the idea of *humanizing* Mobil. Giving the company a personality, complete with ideas that need to be shared. Here he is much later in life, describing his strategy:

Well, it was multifaceted, it was a personality where we believe very strongly about the importance of public policy issues. We believed fervently that as custodians of vast resources in employment and everything else, that we were not doing our job if we did not participate in the marketplace of ideas in the debates on public policy issues,part of our personality was we believed in that a democracy is composed of a group of free institutions. We believed in free markets. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, academic freedom. Freedom to organize and participate in union activities.

Schmertz believed that “freedom of speech” was a right that corporations should have, just as much as individuals. Sound familiar? One of his first moves was to shift Mobil away from just advertising... you know, gas... and toward what came to be known as “issue advertising”. If you hear an oil company ad today it’s almost always about an issue. Consider this ExxonMobil carbon capture ad, for example:

They don’t even mention that ExxonMobil has a consumer product you can buy. You wouldn’t know from this commercial that they even supply gas stations. That all started with Herb Schmertz. But he didn’t stop there. In 1970 when the New York Times opened up its op-ed pages to advertising for the first time, Schmertz  developed a new kind of ad: the advertorial.

He wanted Mobil’s ads to be just as smart and provocative as any editorial that might appear in the section otherwise. He hired legit writers to pen them, and eventually ran them every week, for decades. They ran the gamut from squawking about taxes to complaining about the media to unexpected takes in favor of pro-public transit.  Schmertz talked about one of his advertorials on the PBS show “The Open Mind”.

I want to turn as quickly as possible to A New Fairy Tale, the mobile ad or op ed piece or editorial, call it what you will. That column,

“A new fairytale” was the title of Schmertz’s latest advertorial, and it criticized PBS for running a film that stereotyped Saudia Arabians. It was, of course, in Mobil’s interest to be seen as a friend and staunch defender of Saudi Arabia.

Herbert, at the end, your conclusion in the ad, we hope that the management of the Public Broadcasting Service will review its decision to run this film. Meaning you hoped they wouldn't run it? Well, at least I review it and exercised responsible judgment in the light of what is in the best interest of the United States. Right. Do you think they did exercise responsible judgment? 

I think they they did a better job after this ad appeared than they otherwise would have.

There were points of view taken very opposite to those that you've just expressed to them.

Yeah, right. That's that's what the whole thing is about is to get all the points of view on the table. 

Of course, that advertorial was also coming from a corporation that happened to be spending a small fortune to underwrite programming on PBS... so it wasn’t necessarily the harmless sharing of ideas that Schmertz makes out there. And really, no advertorials were. They were meant, as Schmertz said, to “influence the influencers.” And the company thought it worked. In various documents and speeches, Schmertz referred to how they helped shape the discourse on key issues to the company, and establish Mobil as the thinking man’s oil company.

In a long-buried briefing we found that Schmertz wrote for the American Management Association in 1978, Schmertz explains why he chose the 

“The Times was chosen because it is published in the nation’s leading population, communications and business center; because it has a highly intelligent, vocal, sophisticated readership and b/c it reaches legislators and other government officials. In short, it was the paper most likely to reach the largest number of opinion leaders and decision makers.”

Schmertz also talks about the program as a great success in this briefing.

“Mobil found that the medium worked,” he writes. “The messages stimulated discussion among influentials on both sides of the issue -- exactly what the company had set out to do.

In a document uncovered by Kert Davies and the Climate Investigations Center, Schmertz goes one step further. Here’s Davies to explain:

“They talk about  having influenced the NYT editorial viewpoints. The document says, “Our analysis shows that the Times has altered or significantly softened their viewpoints on conservation -- moving from a total reliance on conservation to advocating increased production incentives to solve the supply shortage. On monopoly and divestitures moving from approving the breakup of the oil companies to opposing divestiture on something called De-control, moving from opposing De-control to urging phased deregulation on natural gas, moving from urging price controls to endorsing a speed-up of deregulation and de-control of new gas prices. And coal, moving from advocating stric environmental safeguards to suggesting more relaxed controls. On off-shore drilling, moving from valuing environmental concerns at the expense of exploration and development to urging accelerated off-shore drilling. And on Gasohol - which is another name for ethanol - moving from increased subsidies for Gasohol production from grain to arguing such subsidies.” So they’re tallying how they have affected the viewpoints of the NYT on conservation, monopoly and divestiture, de-control, natural gas, coal, off-shore drilling and gasohol. All things they had written op-eds on.

Now of course any PR guy worth his salt is always going to claim more success, and more credit for that success, than he might be due, but the important thing here is that the goal of the advertorials was to influence key decision makers.

Harvard science historian Geoffrey Supran has studied these advertorials at length.

No doubt the fossil fuel industry has been very effective at one thing presenting itself, you know, in terms of personas rather than just  a corporation

He says you can’t even tell the difference anymore.

 “really embedding themselves into our culture and our society and our media in an increasingly insidious way that makes it hard to discern when you are being advertised to versus, you know, you're simply being sort of reprogrammed to see that world and society in a slightly different way.

Mobil was convinced enough that its advertorial strategy worked to keep running them weekly in the Times for decades. It was even a program Exxon kept doing after it acquired Mobil.

[00:17:25] Even in some of the advertorials themselves, they literally invented uh modern opinion advertorials. And as you know, they've taken out about one in four of all the advertorials that ever appeared 

on the op ed page of The New York Times. [00:17:56][31.1]

Geoffrey has an accent and this was a phone interview, so I just want to make sure you heard that. 

One in four, so 25%, of all advertorials that have ever run in the New York Times’ op-ed pages, were commissioned by Mobil or ExxonMobil.

political scientists studying these obituaries have described this campaign as towering over all other competitors in its sheer volume and expanse.

ExxonMobil doesn’t run its advertorials anymore, but it’s moved on to the latest iteration: campaigns made by the New York Times itself. Yeah, let that sink in for a minute. It’s not the news room, it’s the brand studio the New York Times created, but still… the same company that puts out the New York Times is making oil companies’ ads for them.

See if you can spot a bit of the Schmertz magic here. In 1978 he said the goal of Mobil’s advertorial campaign was to “stimulate discussion among influentials.” In 2020, the New York Times Brand Studio website’s main message is: 

“Stories that Influence the Influential.”

Here’s a campaign they did for ExxonMobil last year, highlighting the company’s algae biofuel program:

The brand studio, again, is separate from the newsroom. There is a definite firewall between advertising and editorial. And every time I talk about these campaigns, 

reporters bristle at the idea that they are being accused of being manipulated or influenced by industry. That is not an accusation I’m making. Whether they are or aren’t is not really the point, though, it’s not even really the goal of these campaigns. The goal is to reach and influence certain types of readers, opinion makers, influencers. And to wrap the industry’s messages in the cloak of credibility provided by The New York Times … or The Washington Post, which also does this. Last year the Post ran a series of stories that its Brand Studio created for the American Petroleum Institute, all about “how natural gas and oil are helping to deliver a sustainable fuel mix.”

These campaigns are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for newspapers at a time when the business model for journalism has never been more strained. And when you ask for proposals on them, as I did, ad sales people start offering all kinds of other things. You could place content they write for you in the climate section, you can peg it to key words like climate change, and make sure it’s a suggested next read on any related news story.

In 2020, influence doesn’t look like an oil tycoon in a top hat showing up at your desk to twirl his mustache and tell you to spike a story. It looks like readers being fed a bunch of oil propaganda before, after and right next to your legit climate reporting.

We have Herb Schmertz to thank for that. [pause for music]

But at this point, we can’t JUST blame Schmertz. The media has to look at its role in this too. After all, propaganda can’t exist without a delivery mechanism, and it’s been quite a while since the media knew what the industry was up to. We’re gonna talk about the media’s responsibility in an upcoming episode, but first … next time, we’re gonna hear a little bit about all of the other things he did for the oil industry and for PR in general. Including, suggesting for the first time that companies don’t actually have to be nice to journalists. In fact, Schmertz, got a lot more out of bullying them. We’ll also dig into that PBS underwriting I mentioned before, the entire TV network schmertz created for Mobil, how he ended up being one of the most influential men in British television and why the heck he got an international emmy in 1986. All that and even more, next time. We’ll see you then.

S3, Ep4 Transcript

Mobil Oil's longtime PR guy Herb Schmertz really started to aggressively manipulate the media. He introduced so many new bells and whistles to Big Oil's propaganda apparatus, we're going to stay with his story for two episodes. In Part 1: Corporate personhood. First Schmertz worked to humanize oil companies by creating the "corporate persona" then he fought for First Amendment rights to be extended to corporations.

Mobil Oil Documents

S3 PR Documents

Schmertz Documents

Information Pollution

S3, Ep5 | Oil Slick, Part 2—False Equivalence and Free Speech