Major News Outlets Give Fossil-Fuel-Funded Think Tanks a Free Platform

National newspapers publish anti-green-energy articles—without disclosing that the authors work for industry-backed groups, a new study finds.

Robert Bryce has written op-eds for several major newspapers—which have failed to mention that he works for the fossil-fuel-backed Manhattan Institute. Photograph of Robert Bryce: <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Robert_bryce_2010.jpg">Larry D Moore</a> / Wikimedia Commons; oil field: <a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&searchterm=oil+field&search_group=&orient=&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&commercial_ok=&color=&show_color_wheel=1#id=3577522&src=cc0abe8a64b75a72f8dbdad75e19d368-3-7">IRC</a> / Shutterstock

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


The fossil fuel industry has long been a source of talking points and “studies” aimed at spreading doubt about climate change, and over the past few years, it has broadened its scope to undermine support for clean energy, as well. Often, this criticism is published in the form of articles in major media outlets—penned by employees of think tanks who don’t disclose their groups’ industry funding, a new study finds.

The Checks and Balances Project, a pro-clean-energy watchdog group, surveyed stories published over the past five years in 60 news outlets, including national and regional newspapers, the Associated Press, and Politico. Researchers found that only 6 percent of the stories disclosed the funding when they cited “experts” from those think tanks. Typically, the stories referred to the groups as “free-market” or “libertarian,” without mentioning the dirty-energy support.

Among the most frequent op-ed contributors is Robert Bryce, a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute, a think tank that has made promoting fossil fuels and downplaying climate change a central focus—and that has received $1.21 million in funding from the likes of ExxonMobil and Claude R. Lambe, a Koch-owned charitable organization. Bryce is quite deft at mowing down clean energy, which is probably why he’s become a regular in the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, on TV, and speaking at events.

The Checks and Balances report notes that Manhattan Institute was mentioned 65 times in the papers it surveyed. That count includes pieces like Bryce’s April 2010 op-ed in the Washington Post, “Five Myths About Green Energy,” which includes lines like, “[I]n in the electric car’s century-long history, failure tailgates failure.” The piece describes Bryce as a senior fellow at Manhattan Institute, but doesn’t mention the funding. Nor does his Wall Street Journal piece from August 2010, “Wind Power Won’t Cool Down the Planet,” which claims that increasing the use of wind will actually increase our emissions of carbon dioxide. Bryce also popped up in a Christian Science Monitor piece on lessons from the BP oil spill, arguing that nothing can compete with oil—again, with no indication that his organization has a dog in the fight. (Media Matters also posted a piece in 2011 that noted Bryce had made 39 different media appearances that failed to disclose the fossil fuel ties.)

Fossil-fuel-funded AEI fellow Steven Hayward has penned WSJ op-eds with titles like “No: Alternatives Are Simply Too Expensive.”

Other conservative think tanks have jumped in the clean-tech-bashing game, too. Take the American Enterprise Institute, recipient of at least $2.8 million in money from fossil-fuel interests like ExxonMobil since 1998. AEI fellow Steven Hayward has penned Wall Street Journal op-eds with titles like “No: Alternatives Are Simply Too Expensive.” Then there’s the Institute for Energy Research, an industry aligned nonprofit that has taken money from Exxon and the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, one of the Koch family foundations. The institute’s president, Thomas Pyle, appeared in a January 2010 Houston Chronicle article arguing that the government should not provide tax credits to renewable energy, because it’s been proven that they are “not economically viable in the marketplace.”

In October 2011, Bryce did get some flack when an op-ed he wrote for the New York Times bashing California’s clean-energy mandate failed to disclose that the Manhattan Institute is supported by oil and gas interests. Checks and Balances, along with a group of 50 journalists and journalism educators, launched a campaign in response, asking the Times to disclose any financial ties of op-ed contributors. The public editor responded with a column calling for more transparency on contributors.

Bryce bristles at the suggestion that Manhattan’s funding might have anything to do with his positions—and indeed, he loudly confronted an advocate from the Checks and Balances Project who asked him about it after a public event earlier this year. He claimed that the percentage of funding that the Manhattan Institute receives from the fossil fuel industry is small—just 2.5 percent of the group’s budget over the past 10 years.

“I have been targeted by the left and I think by people who have a lot of interest in pushing renewables,” Bryce told Mother Jones in an interview earlier this year. “When it comes down to it, facts can’t be bought, and people who attack me on the whole question of funding, they can’t attack my numbers, they can’t attack the physics, so they attack me.”

The complaints haven’t slowed Bryce down at all; he’s continued to place op-eds bashing renewables and promoting fossil energy in prominent national outlets. Meanwhile, his criticism has expanded from seemingly reasonable concerns about the ability to bring renewables to scale to more bizarre allegations about “wind-turbine syndrome”— purported mental and physical health effects attributed to the low-frequency noise of turbines that have been widely debunked as having no scientific or epidemiological evidence to support them—and complaints about how the wind industry has a “license to kill golden eagles.”

For its part, the Checks and Balances Project says it just wants groups backed by dirty-energy money to disclose their funding when they’re cited in the press. From the report: “Overall, we think that whether it’s for a quote, background information, a citation or a byline, ‘think tank’ sources should be asked a simple, step-and-repeat question: ‘Do you get money, directly or indirectly, for interests that stand to benefit from what you are saying?'”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate