Yesterday we talked about the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board’s apparent sundowning, as it seems to forget everything but its allegiance to fossil fuels. But it turns out that’s not the most egregiously bad behavior from an editorial board lately, as an investigation by Ben Paviour for Virginia Public Media revealed.
This year the Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press have published at least seven generally positive editorials about Dominion Energy, the Virginia energy company that (finally) bowed to the wide-spread opposition to its behind-schedule and over-budget Atlantic Coast Pipeline earlier this year. But it turns out that one of the papers' columnists, Gordon “G.C.” Morse, wrote some of the editorials while he was … wait for it … also employed as a speechwriter for Dominion Energy!
So what readers were led to believe were the independent opinions of a local newspaper were actually one of Dominion Energy’s pipeline propaganda “lessons learned” in 2017: that if they want “fair” coverage, “[they] need to pay for it.”
While technically they paid Morse to write up to a half-dozen speeches for Dominion executives throughout the year, the dramatic shifts in editorial style, tone and content that Paviour documents suggest Morse’s editorial positions changed with Dominion’s whims.
Even though the Dominion editorials lacked any disclosure of his job at the company in question, Morse agrees it is something people should know. After all, he told the previous editorial team about it! But he forgot to tell the current staff there, and having heard about his freelancing for Dominion, they told Paviour that “we opted to not assign Dominion-related topics to him going forward.”
Morse’s columns include a biographical sketch about his career working for corporations like Dominion Energy, suggesting it’s worth disclosing. Why is it not worth noting for the unsigned editorials Morse writes? Apparently when Paviour asked him about it, “Morse suggested in an email that his existing disclaimers included in his columns were sufficient for readers of the unsigned editorials as well.”
Of course! Because whenever you read an editorial, you naturally go look up every possible columnist who could’ve drafted it, and then compare the writing style to those columnists' other work, to see if maybe they’re moonlighting as a writer for the very company praised in the editorial!
As Paviour concludes, Morse knows that readers shouldn’t consider him to be an unbiased source of information, because he wrote exactly that in 2018: “Let me quickly concede, I have done too much work over the years for energy companies — first for Entergy in Louisiana, then Dominion Energy here — to be seen as an unbiased source of information.”
So how is he biased when his name’s on the line, but unbiased when it’s not?