People, by and large, are good. Organizations and institutions, by and large, are flawed. News media is no exception.
Far too often, the great work reporters do gets undercut by the advertising placed around their stories. Politico's energy and climate reporters are top-notch, while its ads are disinformation. Same goes for Semafor — sort of.
Emily Atkin's always-excellent HEATED newsletter recently provided an update to October's news on Semafor’s misleading Chevron ads. The ads disappeared from the emailed newsletter, apparently at the request of their climate editor Bill Spindle. But they wouldn't remove them from the site, and as a result, Spindle is publishing on Substack these days instead.
Then this week, the Charleston Gazette-Mail, a Pulitzer-winning West Virginia newspaper, fired three of its reporters who criticized company President Doug Skaff’s chummy interview of coal CEO Don Blankenship,who was sentenced to a year in federal prison for conspiring to violate mine safety laws after a mine explosion in 2010.
John Raby's AP story describes how Blankenship's comment that climate change is "an absolute hoax" is allowed to go "unrebutted, even though scientists say their confidence in the fact that global temperatures are rising and that the increase is caused by human activity is equivalent to the scientific certainty that cigarette smoking is deadly."
It seems to have been more of a promotional event than a news interview, as "Blankenship also is asked to promote his 2020 book about the mine disaster, in which he repeats his claims of innocence and blames the administration of then-President Barack Obama."
Yes, apparently it was Obama's fault that there wasn't sufficient ventilation in Blankenship's mine to prevent the "accumulations of coal dust and methane gas" from igniting because of a spark from the "worn and broken cutting equipment" being used. And apparently the then-president of the United States should have fixed and cleaned out the "broken and clogged water sprayers" in Blankenship's mine to prevent "what should have been a minor flare-up" from becoming "an inferno" that killed 29 people.
Turns out that reporters at the Charleston Gazette-Mail like Ryan Quinn, Lacie Pierson and Caity Coyne, were not impressed, and they expressed their dissatisfaction on Twitter. Coyne, for example, previously covered the mine explosion for the paper and felt the interview was "a slap in the face" to the "families whose loved ones died" in the disaster that Blankenship baselessly blamed on Obama.
It turns out that while the paper wasn't impressed by its reporters expressing themselves, it might have also been ashamed of its interview, as it removed the video of the interview from its website.
Pierson told AP that she and her colleagues were fired because of their social media "insubordination," and Quinn said that he had been told he "publicly hurt the company."
After the firing, Pierson tweeted that "Today I'm announcing my candidacy for any job in the world" after "joining Caity and Ryan as having spoken our principles and living to tell the tale."
So if you know any news organizations good enough for them, it sounds like there's some great journalists ready to tell the truth to their audience, fossil fuel advertisers and coal CEOs be damned!
No seriously, Big Oil and coal barons, and their intentional exploitation of media as a tool for their PR and disinformation campaigns can go to hell.