A staple tactic that industries use to defend their dangerous products from regulation is to fund other organizations to argue on their behalf, without the appearance of having an obvious conflict of interest. Sometimes it's obvious front groups set up by a single company to fight some local policy, but for nearly a century the energy industry has funded a network of lobby groups to deny the harms of products and delay regulations.
These days it's rarely all that effective on anyone who bothers to do some due diligence on the groups; legitimate journalists tend to do funding- and fact-checks to avoid being used as a tool and publishing a "news" story that's actually a free political advertisement.
In contrast, propagandists posing as journalists, like Fox News’ Thomas Catenacci, conveniently overlook where organizations get their funding — except for when it's politically expedient to notice. Since they're saying what Fox considered to be politically correct, though, Catenacci either didn't know or didn't care that the groups who recently submitted comments to the Biden administration to oppose regulations on gas stoves were backed by the fossil fuel industry, which has known of gas stove dangers for over 100 years.
"Biden admin receives backlash from nearly two dozen groups for move cracking down on gas stoves," Catenacci’s headline declares. Wow, "nearly two dozen groups" sounds like a pretty sizable contingent! Are these groups of chefs and cooks, perhaps? Are they coalitions of restaurateurs and home cooking influencers, or others worried about not getting some sort of unique value from gas stoves? Of course not.
For starters, it's not even "nearly two dozen groups," as the very first sentence begins by contradicting the headline, disclosing that Catenacci is reporting on "a coalition of 18 energy and consumer advocacy organizations." For the math-adverse, a dozen is 12, two dozen is 24, and 18 is exactly halfway in between the two. So it's just as "nearly" one dozen groups as it is two. That's not exactly germane to the story, but when the fourth word of a story proves the headline was either written by a useful idiot or knowing industry agent, it doesn't exactly inspire confidence. (Nor does the other, less likely third option, that he's just a regular idiot.)
Since Catenacci doesn't bother to actually include a link to the comments he's supposedly reporting on, we don't know what all 18 groups are, but he does list 11 of them. The effort was led by Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), and signers "include the Caesar Rodney Institute, Center for the American Experiment, Mackinac Center for Public Policy, Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, Heartland Institute, Science and Environmental Policy Project, Energy & Environment Legal Institute, Consumers’ Research, Institute for Energy Research and FreedomWorks."
Because Catenacci didn't, we'll do a little reporting on why these groups may actually be opposed to a regulation on a fossil fuel product: CEI's funders have included ExxonMobil and the Kochs. The Caesar Rodney Institute has received funding from the American Energy Alliance and American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers. The Center for the American Experiment's funders have included Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, the Koch-loved "dark money ATM" that allows the true donors of funds to these groups to remain confidential.
To complete the rest of the list, the Mackinac Center has taken money from Koch and ExxonMobil, as has the Institute for Energy Research. The Thomas Jefferson Institute has taken money from Koch-affiliated groups and DonorsTrust, as has Heartland, SEPP, and EELI. FreedomWorks has gotten tons of money from those sources and more, and Consumers’ Research is the group turning the anti-ESG campaign into an anti-trans hate project.
So while Fox may describe this group of 18 as a "coalition" of "nearly two dozen groups" opposed to cleaner stoves, the reality is that nearly one dozen groups that have taken fossil fuel money were critical of proposed regulations that would impact fossil fuel sales.
Not exactly "news" — unless, of course, you work at Fox.