Back in February, we pointed out that despite a relatively good reputation that should’ve been permanently destroyed by their racist Facebook shenanigans, the RealClear brand has been pretty plainly corrupted by the Koch cash it’s received, and is regularly running denial content by people with obvious financial reasons to promote fossil fuels.
At this point, it seems like they’re proud of it. In the last week they’ve run: a piece attacking California and defending Trump on wildfires, written by Death’s PR man Steve Milloy; a piece praising natural gas by a guy from a Koched-up wing of George Mason; an anti-renewable energy screed by an “anti-science propagandist” and anti-wind activist John Droz Jr.; an anti-China and anti-climate take by Rupert Darwall, longtime denier and now a senior fellow at RealClear Foundation; a pro-gas piece by the CEO of the American Gas Association (AGA); and an argument in favor of Gulf oil drilling, by the head of the Consumer Energy Alliance, a group Geoff Dembicki exposed as a Koch et al front back in 2011 (see his recent VICE piece about Big Oil tapping Big Tobacco’s lawyers to defend themselves in court!)
Each of these pieces (except for Dembicki’s, which are excellent) contains a slew of errors and misrepresentations that any legitimate news organization should be embarrassed to publish. And each of them was signed by someone who has a very-hard-to-miss financial bias in favor of fossil fuels and against renewables, for whom even cursory google searches reveal what should be disqualifying conflicts of interest.
But as the piece by the CEO of the AGA reveals, RealClear has absolutely no qualms about publishing transparent fossil fuel propaganda.
In fact, they even make it a point to highlight that kind of misleading nonsense, with an entire section of “Energy Realism,” that’s part of their “sponsored curation” series “developed in partnership with top brands and institutions that have an interest and point of view on the subject at hand.” While they don’t disclose who actually sponsored the curation, the selection yesterday included the Chamber of Commerce’s “study” about the dangers of a fracking ban, an opinion opposing to offshore wind, and a piece blaming environmentalists for California’s fires by Alex “I Heart Fossil Fuels” Epstein, and featuring Michael Shellenberger. In other words, it's definitely someone quite oily.
Then there are the sidebar sections, which don’t say they’re sponsored content, but like seemingly most other things on the RealClearEnergy page, certainly serve as spon-con.
“Fracking Is Good” is one section, while the Peabody Coal-popularized term “Energy Poverty” is another. And Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans, perhaps the most debunked documentary ever, released five months ago, is still apparently a relevant section for RealClear’s propaganda.
As an aggregator, though, RealClear likes readers to believe they offer a balanced perspective of both right and left-leaning views. But a look at their original content shows exactly how balanced they aim to be, with post after post of climate denial, most penned by paid propagandists.
Since the summer of 2019, when the Daily Caller lost their Koch-trained climate denial churnalist Michael Bastasch (whose Twitter bio indicates is now a “writer at Fox News,” though we haven’t seen anything there from him to make fun of) and Tucker Carlson started bad-mouthing the Kochs (who funded the Caller), we’ve been wondering who would take the Daily Caller’s place as the go-to outlet for the climate denial network’s writing. Where would they land pieces that can’t get published anywhere that subjects submissions to fact checking, or has any sort of rules against blatant conflicts of interest?
By now, the answer seems RealClear.
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