The other day we mentioned RealClear’s advertorial content, linking to a Drilled podcast about former Mobil Oil VP Herb Schmertz. As their PR guy, he brought a slate of the classic doubt-mongering tactics to the table, most notably the use of advertisements that are written and designed to look like a newspaper editorial, aka advertorials. This very intentionally deceptive effort to make readers think the ad was actually something written by the newspaper started back in ‘72, and continued every Thursday for decades.
Fast forward to 2015, and in response to InsideClimate News and other reporting and subsequent lawsuits regarding the fact that Exxon knew about climate change for decades, yet sought to obfuscate the public’s understanding of that information, the company claimed that it had never hid what it knew. It went so far as to issue a challenge to the public, to read the documents themselves and “make up your own mind.”
Well a couple of researchers, Merchants of Doubt co-author Naomi Oreskes and her Harvard colleague Geoffrey Supran, took up ExxonMobil’s challenge, and analyzed various internal documents about the dangers of climate change with those advertorials that they ran between 1977 and 2014. And what do you know! The internal and external pictures were quite different!
That study was published in 2017, and of course ExxonMobil wasn’t happy about it. They’ve now published a response in the same journal as the original study, and it’s only repeated the cycle of self-sabotage.
ExxonMobil VP Vijay Swarup claims that Supran and Oreskes analysis is flawed and misleading because it was actually Mobil that ran the advertorials, before the ExxonMobil merger, and that the thirty-six advertorials examineed weren’t enough to really make a judgement. And for a third point, Swarup points to an ExxonMobil-commissioned analysis that attacks their findings.
Clearly not ones to shy away from a challenge, Supran and Oreskes went back to work, and have replied to ExxonMobil’s comment with another paper in ERL, a Guardian op-ed, and on social media (just to make sure everyone, from the ivory tower to Twitter, knows what’s up).
As it turns out, looking at even more advertorials (1,448 this time) shows even more deception. “The results strengthen our original finding,” they write, and “we now conclude with even greater confidence that Exxon, Mobil, and ExxonMobil Corp misled the public.”
Strike one of ExxonMobil’s first claim! But what about the confusion between what Exxon knew, what Mobil advertised, and what ExxonMobil is now responsible for? Is Swarup right that Supran and Oreskes sought to mislead readers by failing to distinguish between the two companies and their merged successor?
They write that Swarup is “both incorrect and misleading. It is incorrect because our original study explicitly attributed each individual advertorial to one of Exxon, Mobil, or ExxonMobil Corp. The addendum further demonstrates that both Exxon and Mobil separately misled the public, and continued to do so once they merged to become ExxonMobil Corp. Moreover, Swarup's claim is misleading, because when Exxon and Mobil merged, ExxonMobil Corp inherited legal and moral responsibility for the parent companies.”
Whoopsies! Turns out two wrongs don’t make a right when you merge them! Strike two!
And how about that counter-report? Well, here’s the thing. Supran and Oreskes allege ExxonMobil paid people to produce pseudo-science to defend against peer-reviewed science. So ExxonMobil’s decision to hire someone to produce a non-peer-reviewed attack on their peer-reviewed study is, as the authors write in the Guardian, “precisely the sort of product-defense maneuvers that ExxonMobil perfected while attacking climate science and climate scientists.” Strike three!
It doesn’t seem like you’d need PR expertise to know better than to do the exact thing you’re claiming you don’t do in response to proof that you engage in that sort of behavior, but apparently whoever’s running ExxonMobil’s public relations these days is no Herb Schmertz. (Which is probably good for the rest of us!)
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