How NPR and Floodlight teamed up to uncover fossil fuel “news mirages” across the country
In March, NPR’s David Folkenflik and Miranda Green of Floodlight co-published a story about The Richmond Standard, a local news site in the town of Richmond, California, that is wholly owned by Chevron. There are no full-time journalists on staff; a PR firm in San Francisco oversees the publication’s operations. It is, Folkenflik and Green said, not so much a news desert as a “news mirage”: “Stories are told — but with an agenda. Facts displeasing to Chevron are omitted; hard truths softened. The company is seeking to get its point of view across and to convey that it can be trusted.”
The story was the latest in a series of stories examining how utilities and fossil fuel interests manipulated local news and attacked public officials to get their way; previous reporting uncovered the ways power companies in Florida and Alabama funded news sites that attacked their critics and how politicians paid a local political outlet in Florida for favorable coverage.
The Richmond Standard, however, stands out for the way it is structured: This is not a story of an outlet being influenced by fossil fuel money, but of an outlet that was set up as a mouthpiece of the company outright. In Richmond, where local news is practically nonexistent — the city’s independent paper shut down a few years ago, though the people behind Berkeleyside and Oaklandside are planning to open a Richmond-focused outlet, Richmondside, this summer — that means it’s difficult for residents to understand just how the company that dominates their city is affecting their lives.
“We don’t know the full story, but we know that you shouldn’t breathe in the air or be outside for that matter,” one Richmond resident told Folkenflik and Green after a flaring incident at the Chevron refinery in the city filled the sky with black smoke. “It would be nice to have an actual news outlet that would actually go out there and figure it out themselves.”
I called Folkenflik and Green to talk about how their story came together, and how news mirages like the Richmond Standard work. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
In that reporting, we got our hands on a bunch of documents that were a starting point for us to dig into how utilities are funneling money toward political campaigns and individuals. As part of that, they were creating and funneling money into media organizations across the states of Alabama and Florida.
David’s interest was piqued, because he’s a media reporter. So he reached out to us…and I ended up pitching him on a partnership, saying, “You know, we actually have thousands of documents that we can go through here, let’s do something.”
To me, that was a sign that they were taking cues from the Standard. The industry must think of this as a gold star standard if they’re putting their own money into doing this. This was the fossil fuel industry, as opposed to a utility company, so they’re not the same industry, but they have similar goals.
We worked with three different reporters who did some local digging from Berkeley into what Chevron had done in Richmond in the last 10 years, and that gave us a really good primer. Some of them helped us find connections to the Ecuador sites, some of them did more digging in interviews in the Permian Basin. [We learned] there were locals on the ground who felt…there was a lot of new stuff there to cover.
David and I flew out and spent five-ish days in the area interviewing people. We had meetings with a local city council member and a former mayor, we had meetings with environmental justice advocates, we walked around and talked to locals at restaurants and at the Rosie the Riveter national park, because we thought that that was really interesting historical context for the area. We got a tour of the Iron Triangle, which is where three train tracks intersect, and saw the local elementary schools and the kids playing soccer right next to the tracks. We also went to what was dubbed a “nature park” that was right next to a landfill that was abutting the Chevron refinery.
What was interesting to me, although I don’t know that I can derive pure correlation/causation, was that after we started reaching out in, I would say, late February — after we’d already been doing some reporting — the pace of coverage posted to the site started to pick up. Previously the home page had some videos that had been there for a couple years, from almost the George Floyd era. It seemed as though suddenly we started to see more and more recent stuff.
A person who had written there previously said that, basically, the idea was to write nothing that made Chevron look bad, and to pick a certain number of stories that made Chevron look good, and make people feel good about the town. And the adjacency of these things together meant that you would have a warmer feeling about Chevron.
It’s a vehicle to get out whatever message they want, and certainly in times of crisis or controversy, they’re massaging the news. But also the notion is “I can feel good about them, because they are there as a resource that is going to tell me about street closings; they’re going to tell me about festivals or food or marching bands.” And you know what, there aren’t a whole lot of [other] sites that do that.
That is pretty much the extent to which [Chevron] talks about themselves. Unless there’s a big event where they’re in the news, sometimes they don’t report on themselves at all. But if there is a big event, they will write about it in a way that is beneficial to them.
The month before we came and visited, there was a huge settlement in the air district, the largest settlement that the air district has ever had with an emitter. Chevron had been fighting it with another fossil fuel company for many, many years. And they finally just gave up and said, “Okay, we’ll pay the fine.”
It was a $20 million dollar fine, and in addition to that, they would have to change a lot of their practices and pay hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure that they weren’t still emitting. It was written about [in other places] everywhere as the largest fine ever and so on. But Chevron’s headline didn’t include the word “fine,” did not mention it was a lawsuit. They couched it as “this is something we’re doing to make sure that we can continue to get Bay Area residents and Richmond residents energy,” as if it was something that they had offered.
I talked to a Richmond resident who gave me a really poignant answer. She said “It’s information. But it’s not news.”
And that’s true, that’s good standard procedure, you should be honest and transparent. But we also know that in practice, most people don’t get their news from going to websites anymore. They get it from links that are shared to them, or [via] word of mouth. And if you clicked on any of these articles, nowhere on the article does it say “news from Chevron.” It will say the name of a person, and if you dig you’ll realize [the person] is actually part of the PR company, Singer, and not a reporter. So the misinformation continues to be part of the system.
But they have a lot of soft power that way. Readers only have so much time in [their] day, and not everybody is taking a graduate seminar in holding Chevron responsible. Maybe the first story they come across says “Chevron has reached an agreement to help further the city’s desire for clean air,” as opposed to “Chevron and the city have joined with regional regulators to resolve longstanding lawsuits over pollution.”
It’s not that it’s untrue. It’s that the context, the framing, the omissions add up to presenting a very different sense of what Chevron’s actually doing. The idea that it’s modernizing is true! But it’s modernizing in the face of an onslaught of regulators taking seriously the application of violation of law.