The News Media Is Selling You Out | Climate Town

whether you get your news online

or you just love the feel of paying a child to wake up at

5am to throw trash at your house one

thing has become extremely clear over the past 10 years there's

a lot more news about the impressive

variety of ways people are destroying

the environment and while everyone on the planet is

technically part of the problem The

Undefeated heavyweight champions of going Hog Wild on the planet we all live on

are of course fossil

fuel companies and it's not even close and we know this because journalists

all over the world are

constantly writing about it and when this exact same thing happened with big tobacco

the public rose up and demanded Swift disgusting

Justice journalists discovered that not only did Big tobacco no cigarettes

gave people cancer but

also they tried to cover it up more

doctors smoke camels than any other cigarette

and also also they were marketing their products to Children a little bit

it tastes good like a

cigarette shirt okay a lot anyway the public found out Attorneys

General got involved and soon cigarettes

were regulated like the dangerous products they very much are the

system kinda worked but

despite exposing hundreds of crimes

and Scandals including the discovery of overwhelming

evidence that Exxon Mobil and the other oil Majors have known for decades

that they were causing climate change despite

oil spills and methane leakages and a thousand other crimes

the fossil fuel industry has somehow managed to keep major public outrage and regulation

at Bay and it probably has something to do with

this Michelle saw the potential for Gravity Light to reduce the output of black

carbon which is a really serious environmental

issue Exxon Mobil is aiming to have the technical ability to produce over 10

000 barrels of algae-based

biofuel per day yeah

fossil fuel companies discovered that they don't have to hide from journalists

if they can just buy advertising

space in the same newspaper to talk about some

little algae farm they have and that's not even mentioning the fact that all

clean energy Investments were

one percent of the fossil fuel spending in 2020.

they don't have to cancel

the article out all they have to do is dilute the bad press with

a little ad placement here or sponsored content there and then a Kardashian

crashes a blimp into a zoo and the world moves on and

this is not a guess I

mean the Kardashian blimp Massacre is a guess but

the strategy of putting misleading

advertisements in liberal-leading media to confuse people with

specifically pioneered by the oil industry

in the 1970s to sanitize their image to the segment of society most likely

to cause them trouble and given the fact that they've been using the same

strategy for the past 50

years to successfully avoid suffering the same fate as the now disgraced

tobacco industry I'd say it's kind of working for him

I'm Riley Williams a guy who dresses like a lobster fisherman the

absolute second fall Hits and a climate science and policy master's degree recipient

and this is a video about how the news media is selling you out

for oil money welcome

to climate town okay

it's pretty important to know that journalists

were investigating big oil companies

even before they knew about climate

change because oil companies

have historically been on the supply side of environmental

disasters and journalists God bless him successfully

informed the public that oil tycoons

and coal Barons were not the good guys I mean this was so culturally

understood that oilmen were the villains in cartoons like Scooby-Doo

he found oil Looney

Tunes Mighty Mouse no one ever gets away from oil can Harry I

mean my God Scrooge

McDuck money swimming nephew

having miserly Scrooge McDuck is a literal oil tycoon

so basically the so basically the public saw fossil fuel companies

as greedy money-loving nerdwells

who would sell out their own grandmother if it meant building an oil well

on her retirement home in

other words you know they had it right that's pretty much what oil companies

were all about they just did whatever made them the most money so as

TV news and print media expanded

in the 1950s and 60s oil billionaires

were terrified that their businesses might get regulated turning

them into penniless oil millionaires

enter the most influential

admin of the 21st

century a guy named herbschmerz

wait I'm sorry that can't be right herb

herb oh herb smurtz

herb smurtz that sounds like a anti-semitic

SNL character Dana Carvey would do holy

Christ I'm Jewish I

wonder how many times I'm about to say Herb smurtz in this episode

place your okay A little background on herb schmirtz he cut his teeth as

a labor lawyer which is apparently

the bare knuckle boxing of the legal world but he also had experience working

in Military Intelligence ran political campaigns

and is a fellow Columbia University

man ah yes Colombia

home of our actual mascot

Rory the lion he

loves Academia the Yoke of student debt

and ruining yoga class and

for seventy thousand dollars a year you'd really expect the mascot pranks of Colombia

to be a little higher concept

I mean for seventy thousand dollars a year we should be getting those hilarious

Dude Perfect boys to do backflips

over the dean anyway

herbschmerz's life really took off in the late 1960s

when he was given the job a VP of public affairs

for Mobile Oil and

tasked with finding a way to make ordinary

Americans more sympathetic to the plight of oil companies

before herb schmertz took the reins mobile had been unsuccessfully

trying to buy America's

love with a car safety campaign entitled

we want you to

we want you to live we at mobile hope you'll remember that fact which

is a pretty normal sentiment

except for when you make a point of saying it and spend millions of

dollars making sure I heard you you

know it kind of sounds like you actually want

to kill me this is a threat this is absolutely a threat like imagine

if Hershey's new campaign was sure

would be a shame if you died tonight so herb smurtz would have to

get creative and creative herbschmerz

got by revolutionizing oil advertising

with one simple idea

don't talk about oil

ever I mean sure that's your number one product and it's how you make

all of your money but why mention that when you can just get your

name associated with things that people actually

like mobile presents Masterpiece

Theater mobile presents a sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art Global presents

some artsy French featuring the only mime to ever get famous Marcel

Marceau it 250 000 for Sesame

pretty soon people started to see that mobile was friends with the stuff they

like so they couldn't be that bad right but

we'll begin pumping money into whatever they could get credit for art contests

in Mexico exhibitions with the Smithsonian

a documentary about Nigeria

and pretty soon an outside Observer

may have thought that mobile was just a fine arts company with

a tiny side hustle selling a little bit of oil AKA

hot chocolate for cars but the real herb

schmertz stroke of Genius was to go after the Critics on their own turf

that's right I'm talking about the pages of

the New York Times and believe it or not this is the best shot

we could get of this sign it's a hundred foot wide sign and this

sort of weird angle is the best we could do anyway in

the 1970s the times opened up their opinion and editorial

pages to advertising and herbschmertz

clocked it as a Golden Goose a

mile away but instead of using the advertising

space to print an ad like hot crackers Mobile Oil is the absolute cat's

ass or however they talked back then herb

Schertz hired real writers to write fake articles that would look like an op-ed

but were actually just mobile propaganda

now you might be familiar with this technique now but herbschmerz

straight up invented the fake article advertisement

that has come to be known as the advertorium

Mobile Oil now had real estate in

the New York Times and could use that space to Trojan Horse mobile propaganda

to oppose factual articles by real journalists

that detail their criminal misconduct

and it worked like crazy here's

Amy Westervelt from the drills podcast talking

about the actual effects of herbschmertz's

mobile campaign in 1982

mobile ran a survey and found that 31

of upscale Americans chose

Mobile Gas second place by a long shot was Exxon

at 16 percent it

was all part of which schmertz

called Affinity of purpose marketing

by the way the drilled podcast insanely

helpful in making this episode go check it out along with everything else Amy

Westervelt is up to link in the bio quick

in the future Kirby

schmertz was a sort of Michael Jordan of helping awful companies

keep their names just clean enough to continue doing business and

big tobacco wanted in on the action see

they saw herb as a sort of PR Moses

who could help lead them to the promised land

of you know not being held accountable for giving people the cancer you

know sort of a non-traditional

Promised Land but everyone's promised land is different anyway

in 1978 William klopfer

Jr the senior VP of the tobacco Institute was so deeply aroused

by a PR Playbook

herb schmertz developed that he retyped

word for word what herbschmertz

wrote before the days of copy paste and mailed it around to his fellow

big tobacco Brethren they were specifically

interested in the idea that you don't have to get the opposition to agree

just get them to give Paws

long enough to lose Steam and of course to caution aggressive opposition AKA

to threaten people who speak out against your company's crimes now this is not

the first partnership between Big Oil and big tobacco

they've been in kahoots since then 1950s

and even began using the same PR firms

to cleanse their images hiring

the same law firms to fight their mounting court cases and even using the

same experts to both claim cigarettes didn't give you cancer and

that climate change was a hoax and is obviously

as that seems to us in hindsight

big tobacco and Big Oil avoided

further regulation and made mountains

of cash selling dangerous products to Consumers

they then funneled a hefty chunk of that cash back

into buying ad space in places like the LA Times The Washington Post the

New York Times and a ton of other media companies and

the cycle continued while actual journalists

from those Publications cranked

out articles demonstrating the links between advertising

the children and teen smoking

or greenhouse gases and climate change the big tobacco Big Oil gravy train kept

on rolling by manufacturing

doubt and giving people just

enough pause to confuse the issues and then big tobacco

got got in the mid 90s more than 40 State Attorneys

General supported by public outrage

punched through the pr machine and forced a master settlement

agreement with the largest U.S tobacco

companies now the settlement itself was pretty severe but the uppercut came when the

New York Times themselves

preemptively decided to ban tobacco

advertising and try not to congratulate

yourselves too hard boys because tobacco

product ads had already been banned on TV and radio for

28 years but I

guess better late than never then more media companies jumped in and suddenly tobacco

found themselves blacklisted by their advertisers

and regulated to Hell soon those poor Executives at Big tobacco were forced to

watch as smoking rates dropped like the sickest nastiest

dubstep beat in that one week in 2003.

you remember that week don't you that

one week between the time we had heard of dubstep but we weren't already

all sick of dubstep

what a week oil

is gas and I need it for my car

you got to get that again so

it'd be pretty weird if the New York Times established

beyond a shadow of the doubt that climate change is here and fossil fuel

companies are to blame and then just let Big Oil advertise

as usual wouldn't it I

mean it'd be pretty wacky

if the times proved

Big Oil was exposing readers to advertising

dangerous to their health and

then just kept taking oil money wouldn't

it I mean it would be pretty freaking random

if you knew Big Oil was intentionally

using your credibility to

undermine your own reporting and then you proceeded to do nothing about

it right and then this is uh the Run of ads here yeah

and then then I do

that we're not yeah

big oils PR campaign

has been so successful

at sanitizing their image that public outrage

has failed to overcome their disinformation

campaign unlike the visceral link between smoking

and cancer the science of climate change requires

more in-depth statistics and despite the conclusions being equally clear on both fronts the

fossil fuel industry had successfully muddied The Waters by paying their own scientists

to generate misleading studies and then publicizing

them with some of the greatest marketing

minds of Our Generation but

wait there's more as

digital media changed the landscape of the average advertising

world the problem got

so super worse media

companies like the New York Times And The Washington Post started

their own internal ad studio and

fossil fuel companies were

delighted to pay them fat stacks of cash to make their advertising

for them okay the New York Times at the top little paid post there

at the top two shells

going Net Zero by 2070.

okay well that's a little later than everyone

else but I guess it's something biofuels

Renewables liquid natural gas wait

okay that's that's a fossil fuel but I mean I guess they're making an

effort okay what's this gray text on Gray background at the bottom here enhanced

the news and editorial staff had no role in this post-creation

okay that feels a little shady but speaking of the editorial Department I wonder

what they're up to maybe shell is doing some really good work let's just

go ahead and uh

okay all right let's take a look at the Washington Post here we go

democracy dies in darkness

here's an article uh

actually no this is an ad that looks just like an article and it's

written by the CEO

of the American petroleum

Institute and it does kind of look like the Washington Post is endorsing the

concept that the reason we haven't solved climate change yet is because we just

haven't collaborated with oil companies

enough like if we look at actual Washington Post articles

we see that oil companies have been collaborating

with the house oversight

committee on their alleged efforts to mislead the public on climate change it seems

like for every negative article these Publications right there's a fossil fuel advertorial

trying to convince you that everything is just fine or at least fine enough

for you to move on with your day

well sheesh David the New York Times has to get paid like everybody else

right yes I'm not suggesting they should do news for

the Love of the Game what

I am suggesting is that fossil fuel advertising

is not exactly a make or break line item for them the New York

Times gets most of their revenue from online subscribers

and all their advertising

combined contributed to less than a quarter of their 2021

revenue and while they don't publicly release how much of that ad money is

from fossil fuels similar

Publications like the guardian estimate

it to be about

0.4 or at least it was point four percent before

the guardian made it zero

percent by completely banning

all fossil fuel advertisements

and this move might have actually made them money because being more selective in

your advertising actually makes you a more desirable place to

advertise but even if the times has to take a financial hit in the

name of journalistic Integrity

they can rest easy knowing

that they also did it when they they banned tobacco ads and

somehow they managed to stay in business now

as you may have guessed we keep the lights on here at climate Town

through patreon subscribers consider joining the patreon and advertising

on these YouTube videos and

wouldn't you know it but a month ago a climate Town viewer made a

startling Discovery all right Raleigh I've seen this happen on more than one occasion

so let's just watch

and see what ad pops

up here how old are you

when America is tested we'll find strength from within protect

our energy Independence keep

American jobs and maintain Global competitiveness

Solutions are made in America with

America's natural gas and oil that's

right baby all right Raleigh I just wanted you to see that my friend

it's a bit jarring to go to a natural gas

commercial in the middle of a climate Town vid and that really bummed me

out so I Googled whether you could turn those off and it turns out

YouTube gives you some control over who can advertise on your channel so I

went to the back end and told oil and gas companies they could absolutely

right off into the night I also turned off get rich quick schemes and

gambling because obviously those are so sure to succeed they don't need any help

from me and so that was that I'll take a small hidden Revenue but

at least now the stuff I think is bad isn't being actively

advertised to the people who watch my videos speaking

of which I'll sometimes get emails from people asking

me to directly advertise

their products now I'm not saying Coca-Cola

is kicking in my door with a duffel bag of cash and a voucher

for a free Polar Bear but I do get some emails

now most of what I get is like here at Patriot

food stash we send real Patriots buckets

of food in case things get out of hand and

I can't tell exactly

what they're up to but I I don't think I like it but every

once in a while we will get a company with a product that actually

is good and aligns with their values and frankly

I'm not above taking money to talk about that kind of thing so I

now present a mid-roll ad if

you've been paying attention to this video or you've been an internet user for

longer than about 15 seconds you know it's probably not a good idea to

just believe whatever you read online and you're probably even aware that we've all

got algorithms funneling us into our own personal click bait dopamine

silos like we're all listical addicted

Lab Rats enter ground news the world's first and groundedest

news comparison platform the whole point is to promote media literacy

and it shows you not just what's in the news but also gives you

a bunch of under the hood tools to help you get a sense for

the bigger picture their bias distribution

tool breaks down how a given story is being covered or not covered by

different sides of the political Spectrum including an independently vetted factuality

rating for each publication you can see who reported a story first and track

how it moves across the world but my personal favorite tool lets you see a

breakdown of who owns each publication which is both a helpful research tool for

writing this show that also comes in handy when I'm trying to figure out

why the Washington Post keeps

telling me that we shouldn't tax billionaires

because they're too handsome and important ground news is trying to teach people to

be more aware of how online news is funded and that's something I'm extremely

down with promoting plus they paid me see that's called Integrity

try it for free at ground.news

the news thing not the in Tech you know what you get it and

that's the end of the ad we are back into the video baby the

New York Times official

stance is that there is no crossover between their editorial department and

their advertising Department never

mind the fact that their own in-house ad team t-brand

Studios makes ads for fossil fuel companies

to look like a New York Times article

the paper's official stance is that if you're reading an actual article that

is pure 100 black

tar journalism baby well

historically that hasn't actually been true according

to a 1980s internal Memo by herb smurtz

oh yeah herb Prince is back baby you thought we're done with herb schmertz

herbs schmirtz for Life a hundred years herbsmartz

anyway R.I.P herbschmerz but according to herbsmartz

the presence of mobile advertising

absolutely soft in the New York Times criticism

of oil companies the times even gave herbschmerz

a full page spread in the style section in 1977.

my Lord look at this God among men but

okay fine let's say the New York Times is right and

their advertising doesn't change a single word in an actual article about fossil

fuel companies fine well

here's the thing about journalism

it doesn't exist in a vacuum for

instance that ad that I just did for ground news if it had instead

been for Exxon mobil's

impressive new baby saving net I'm pretty sure the cognitive dissonance

between the content of the video and

the content of the ad would

have been a little confusing

for everybody it's like when you put strawberries

in fruit salad and pretty soon they end up tasting like

cantaloupe I get the strawberries didn't start out tasting

like God's greatest mistake

but pretty soon the whole salad is

inundated with an inedible cantaloupe

flavor here's Amy Westervelt

with the impressive Buffet of services the

New York Times ad Department can offer a fossil fuel company ad

sales people start offering all kinds of things you

could place content they write for you in the climate section you

can Peg it to keywords

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 and the thing that chafes

my ass more than anything is

the fact that the New York Times already

knows they should ban fossil fuel ads you want to know how I know

because they already did it with their podcast the daily and

they also banned fossil fuel ads on their climate newsletter

so what's stopping them from just finishing

the job on the rest of their platforms

why are these people at the top of big media companies not

walking it like they're talking it

well it's probably because they don't think people really care

but guess what we

do and Matt does too don't you man what's up so if you don't

love it when fossil fuel companies buy fake credibility from the place you get

your news you can say it directly to the people that allow that to

happen we've partnered with a scrappy little climate group called climate

change makers and together we've developed a Playbook to contact and

let's face it shame

these people into making the right decision now the link to the full Playbook

is in the description but

the tldr is that there are Executives

and bosses at these big media companies and they need a little help realizing

that running fossil fuel ads is deeply unpopular

now I don't know for sure but I gotta imagine receiving

an avalanche of polite

but firm tweets and emails

and DMS to their public-facing

profiles might go a long way in helping some of these people see the

light and at the very least you'll

give them a better sense that more of their readership is

aware and annoyed that they keep running fossil

fuel ads and maybe just

maybe it might help someone stop running ads

from the companies that are according

to them destroying Life as We Know It

thank you for watching climate town I really appreciate

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I will never really understand Link

in the bio thank you so much for watching see

you next time I

have not tried marijuana

have never used it at any time

so how many times did I say herbschmartz

including that last one if you think you know email it to the email

address that we're showing on the screen right now and if you're right I'll

send you like a custom voicemail or something wacky