Climate activist and researcher Naomi Oreskes suggested in a recent interview that journalists shouldn’t speak to energy producers, and that energy companies’ speech should be regulated on social media, because she considers what they have to say to be propaganda. Thankfully, Oreskes isn’t in charge of making those decisions, but her influence with the press and activist community makes this proclamation all the more troubling.
In her interview with the New Zealand Listener, Oreskes came out against journalistic balance and objectivity:
“The fossil-fuel industry exploited the journalistic ideals of fairness, objectivity and particularly the idea of balance to manipulate journalists into presenting what was essentially propaganda, what we would now call fake news, as the other side of a science story – not as a political story or an economic story but as the other side of a science story, when, in fact, it wasn’t a science story at all.”
Of course, speaking to representatives of the energy industry can provide readers with broader context and subject matter expertise, but Oreskes would prefer that point of view be left out of coverage. And she is ready to use the force of law to ensure agreement, telling the Listener that she supports regulation of social media to stop the spread of “disinformation:”
“All previous electronic media – radio, telephone, television – have been regulated. There’s absolutely no reason why this newest form should not be regulated. And people who cry ‘free speech! free speech!’ are ignoring history.”
Of course, the sort of conversation Oreskes is considering is one where only one side of the debate—namely climate activists—gets to speak, even when energy producers could provide a separate perspective on the direct impacts of climate policies.
But she might have her own reasons for wanting to prevent journalists from asking tough questions – she has been caught playing fast and loose with facts before.
In 2017, she published a paper with Geoffrey Supran that used content analysis to argue that ExxonMobil had misled the public on climate change. Their study was hyped in the New York Times, but didn’t stand up to scrutiny, since—as Energy in Depth reported at the time—it relied on cherry-picked data originally collected by Greenpeace.
Kimberly Neuendorf, Ph.D., the Cleveland State University professor who literally wrote the book on the content analysis technique used by Oreskes and Supran, prepared a blistering rebuttal of their paper, calling their results “unreliable, invalid, biased, not generalizable, and not replicable.”
Even after the paper’s flaws were so publicly exposed, Supran and Oreskes continued to perpetuate its flawed conclusions in new reports, including a report they published last October claiming that “science denial continues unabated.” This could be true—at least if anything less than full conformity to climate activism is considered “climate denial.”
Oreskes has also been vocal about her desire to see Congress investigate the fossil fuel industry “and its allies,” as a precursor to possible criminal charges.
As she told E&E News:
“I think it’s incredibly important for the committee to investigate not only the fossil fuel industry itself but also the network of third-party allies that have been involved with this. Obviously, getting fossil fuel executives on the witness stand in the same way that tobacco executives were on the stand would be important, as well.”
Oreskes has long supported myopic climate policy that seeks to destroy traditional energy and manufacturing without reckoning with the very real needs for these companies and their products to maintain our modern way of life. However, she’s rarely been so open about the harsh controls she also wants to put on free speech and a free press.
In her world, journalistic fairness and objectivity are on the wrong side of history. It looks like she is moving out of the climate spin zone and into full press regulation.
