Powerline Explains The Conservative Approach To Journalism

9:26 pm EST May 4th, 2009 | Media | 9 Comments

Arguing about this story on 60 Minutes involving a dispute between Ecuador and Chevron over unclean oil dump sites left in the country, Powerline sums up the conservative view on how these disputes should be resolved in the public eye:

If you want facts rather than biased sensationalism, you have to go to the company, not the television show.

That’s right. We all know that giant corporations – especially multibillion dollar oil concerns – are the straightest of straight shooters.

Look, I’m the last person to throw in all my trust with the mainstream media – I see images they manipulate all day long – but the last person I’m going to trust on a story like this is the megacorp that stands to lose money.

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9 Responses to “Powerline Explains The Conservative Approach To Journalism”

  1. jr says:
    May 4, 2009 at 10:06 pm

    Assrocket will do anything to please the vested interests

  2. ed says:
    May 4, 2009 at 10:07 pm

    Powerline makes Fox News look subtle.

  3. Jay Tea says:
    May 4, 2009 at 11:28 pm

    I must confess a radical thing: I went to the link and read the article. The quote Oliver lifted is accurate, but poorly phrased.

    A better summary would have been “if you want the full story, go to the company and get their side — then fact-check it yourself. Because that’s not what the mainstream media will do.”

    The story appears to be:

    1) TexPet (Texas Petroleum) and PetroEcuador (the state-owned oil company partnered to explore for oil in Ecuador.

    2) At the end of the project, the Ecuadoran government certified that TexPet had met its obligations to clean up after itself.

    3) Conversely, they also said that PetroEcuador did NOT clean up after itself.

    4) TexPet later became Texaco, and even later than that merged with and became a part of Chevron.

    Chevron’s argument is that the pollution is NOT from the company they acquired, but from the Ecuadoran government-owned company — as the Ecuadoran government certified at the time.

    And drat it, it appears they have their facts in order.

    J.

  4. News Reference says:
    May 5, 2009 at 12:01 am

    Corporate accountability?

    See: Exxon/tobacco corporation anti-science FUD.

    Beyond the tobacco corporations blowing smoke in the American public’s faces for decades by selling addictive killer drugs to children, Exxon has used the Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt/ misinformation principles honed by tobacco corporation liar lobbyists to push back serious climate change solutions for decades.

    The consequences? Well, beyond the predictable millions and millions that live along coast lines losing their homes as the oceans slowly rise, there’s that little thing about the glaciers that supply vast amounts of earths drinkable river water drying up.

    What does that mean? During summer months rivers will dry up because the glacial melts aren’t replenishing them. This is now a global phenomenon.

    Reality denying, anti-science right wingers have been obstructing addressing global climate change realities every step of the way.

    First the Exxon anti-science brigade claimed climate change wasn’t happening (some right wing holdouts are still denying observable reality).

    Next, when the reality became undeniable for anyone who wanted to be taken seriously, the Exxon anti-science brigade claimed it wasn’t that dire. But that’s been shown to be a lie.

    Then the reality denying Exxon and their reality denying right wing anti-science brigade claimed there was nothing that could be done about climate change, which was always nonsense.

    Now the anti-science brigade is claiming that it would be too expensive and that gambling the planets climate system is just gonna happen. Still nonsense.

    There are even coal companies that are trumpeting magic non-existent technology will save US, but they aren’t spending even a dime on researching the non-existent and dubious technological ‘fixes.’

    They ARE however spending a lot of money on their corporate lie machine.

    And the corporate media is being typically subservient to the Exxon/coal/oil/shale corporate interests.

    Watch right wing climate denier George Will embarrass himself both in print and on the TV every week on mislabeled ‘liberal’ outlets.

    The right wing: ready to gamble the climate for their short sighted sociopathic greed, all enabled by your friendly right wing corporate media outlet that the right wing Orwellianly mislabeled “liberal.”

  5. BrianK says:
    May 5, 2009 at 12:19 am

    I’m glad that 60 minutes is finally catching up to the BBC, who ran this story back in 2007. Greg Palast has been reporting on this for several years for the BBC. You can see more about this from:

    1. BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/7113903.stm)

    2. DemocracyNow (http://www.democracynow.org/2007/12/27/greg_palast_reports_on_the_battle)

    3. Greg’s video on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUc24oOGPyo).

    And Chevron/Texaco’s basic defense – that it was PetroEcuador’s fault – does feature in Palast’s reporting as well as the 60 Minutes piece. So the mainstream media AND Greg Palast both got the company’s side of the story.

    John’s piece on Powerline would like you to believe that the poor oil companies are being shut out of the media – despite Jay’s generous re-writing of the story above – and it’s only “independent-minded” folks like them who know the real story. Too bad the facts say otherwise…

  6. News Reference says:
    May 5, 2009 at 12:31 am

    I keep thinking that “Jay Tea” couldn’t soil his reputation any further but today he’s now defending a massive corporate pollution scandal.

    Seriously “Jay Tea”? Now you’re in cahoots with corporate malefactors trying to defend MASSIVE environmental disasters?

    What is it about right wing cultists that so many of them slavishly fall to their knees in obeisance to nearly any and every corporate malfactor? With one notable exception.

    Right wingers go ballistic if a media corporation accidently reveals inconvenient facts but still will go out of their way to literally defend toxic waste.

    Here’s a funny/sad press release from the Amazon Defense Coalition at Marketwatch that looks at the “Public Relations Disaster” of Chevron sending an incompetent liar out to defend their disastrous environmental malfeasance.

    “The spokesperson, Sylvia Garrigo, did not disappoint the company’s detractors – she quickly made the bizarre claim that trace amounts of oil in the makeup on her face was no more harmful that the toxic sludge filmed by 60 Minutes in hundreds of unlined waste pits Texaco built in Ecuador’s rainforest that are still polluting soils and groundwater, according to an independent court expert.”

    The release goes on to reveal several pertinent facts including that “The lawsuit alleges that Texaco dumped billions of gallons of waste into the rainforest from 1964 to 1990, decimating indigenous groups and causing dramatic increases in cancer rates.”

    The press release is worth reading as a counterpoint to “Jay Tea’s” cherry picking mis-reporting of the Corporate PR spin.

  7. News Reference says:
    May 5, 2009 at 12:36 am

    “BrianK”‘s news articles on the subject:

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/7113903.stm

    http://www.democracynow.org/2007/12/27/greg_palast_reports_on_the_battle

    And a YouTube video:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUc24oOGPyo

    “BrianK”, make sure link/URLs don’t touch anything like a (bracket) or even a [.] period and they should come out clickable.

  8. Oliver Willis says:
    May 5, 2009 at 1:56 am

    A better summary would have been
    Ah yes, but this isn’t about what Powerline should have/would have written but about what they actually wrote.

    Furthermore, as the story on 60 minutes made pretty clear – the operation of these wells was a purely Texaco deal. There was a partnership with the local utility but the actual operator was Texaco.

    Conservatives complain often about media depictions of the evil corporation. But this isn’t an archetype worked up in a George Soros drum circle. Too often corporations are allowed to act outside the sphere of morality and law.

  9. PD100 says:
    May 5, 2009 at 10:01 am

    Nice to see Cheveron using the Union Carbide / DOW Chemical dodge. “Bhopal? What’s that?”