Last Tuesday, the conservative Washington Examiner's energy and environment reporter Jeremy Beaman published a series of charts showing "how fossil fuels have fared under Biden." It pits Biden's "campaign pledges to crack down on fossil fuels" with the reality that "domestic oil and gas production has recovered from the pandemic recession to near all-time highs under President Joe Biden."
Oil production? "Now headed toward all-time highs." Methane gas? "Production reached its highest level on record in December 2021." Active oil and gas drilling rigs? "Up by 261, a nearly 175% increase, for the year ending May 13." Yet prices are still high, because the industry really loves paying CEOs millions while cutting salaries for workers.
Unfortunately, it seems Republicans missed the story, because the next day Ted Cruz and a bunch of other senators called on the Biden administration to stop worrying about the pesky permitting process and just let Big Oil do whatever it wants, for the sake of gasoline prices.
And like the compliant GOP media arm it is, Fox's Tyler O'Neil also ignored the Washington Examiner's empirical findings to "report" on the Cruz letter, and ends with a quote from tobacco shill turned Big Oil lawyer Steve Milloy, who said "I blame Biden for all lack of production. He has scared away investment."
Of course! A fake expert delivering a false quote to Fox News. What could be better? How about a false Fox narrative quoting a fake expert, but in a literal fake news outlet, by an actually fake reporter?
One "Scout Titterington" at Beam.land appears to have pulled the full text from the O'Neil's story, resulting in the first line of her story being the Fox caption for a semi-related video at the top of their coverage, an interesting detail that will make sense in a minute.
Because in order to not literally plagiarize and steal Fox's work, Titterington simply changed words around- including direct quotes from the story!
O'Neil's reported that the "Republican senators slammed the Biden administration for a 'de facto ban on new drilling.'"
Titterington wrote that "Republican senators criticized Biden Administration for a 'virtual ban on new drilling.'"
O'Neil included a paragraph-length quote from the Senators, which Titterington barely rewrote in the same fashion, changing "fault" to "blame," and "sitting idle" to the inaccurately-different "stopping work." In Fox, it's the Department of Interior. At Beam, the US apparently has a "Ministry of the Interior," and Milloy's quote about how Biden has supposedly "scared away investment," got turned into "the investment has taken him away," which somehow makes even less sense.
That's the end of the story- but where things really start to get weird. Scout Titterington's bio reads “Infuriatingly humble alcohol fanatic. Unapologetic beer practitioner. Analyst.”
Aww, how cute and kitschy! It's apparently house style.
Gardner Bailey, who ripped off a Reuters story, is a “Infuriatingly humble analyst. Bacon maven. Proud food specialist. Certified reader. Avid writer. Zombie advocate. Incurable problem solver.” Caldwell Hampton is a “Total coffee junkie. Tv ninja. Unapologetic problem solver. Beer expert.” Wynne Daves? “Lifelong beer expert. General travel enthusiast. Social media buff. Zombie maven. Communicator.” Keeping with the theme, Talia Quinn's an “Alcohol enthusiast. Twitter ninja. Tv lover. Falls down a lot. Hipster-friendly coffee geek." And Blake Rodriquez mixes the lot of them, as a “Typical beer trailblazer. Hipster-friendly web buff. Certified alcohol fanatic. Internetaholic. Infuriatingly humble zombie lover.”
Wow, either this is the hippest, most zombie-obsessed beer-swilling workplace this side of 2010, or someone fed a million terrible twitter bios into a machine learning algorithm, and this is what it spit out.
And while the latter seems less likely, the fact that none of the above problem solvers seem to exist outside of Beam's website suggest it may actually be the more likely choice. No search results on Google, and reverse image searching their profile pictures suggests they're just stock photos, though Thalia Quinn uses the same pic as Emma Lefèvre of MEDIAS FRANCE on LinkedIn, and Paola Moraes on Twitter, who posted links to a french media page, while Gardner Bailey also apparently goes by Dwanye Menzie at the Prudent Press Agency.
A reporter without a real online presence in 2022 isn't unheard of, but 6 for 6?
And all six happen to produce identically AI-esque copies of mainstream media coverage?
Beam.land appears to be some sort of marketing content aggregator, scraping stories from the internet, without attribution, and running them under the bylines of their own reporters.
Fake news with fake reporters posting fake stories from Fox, which is supposedly real news, but also full of fake experts and false narratives.