Criticism Of Medias Energy Coverage

Image: Robin Eley

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The cover of a recent BusinessWeek about the runup in oil and gasoline prices framed the question of what’s causing it nicely: “Speculation or Manipulation?” But the story was maddeningly evenhanded. By dodging its own question, the magazine raised another.

When it comes to the cost of gasoline, who should we believe? Here are some nominees and their viewpoints:

1. The oil companies: It’s supply and demand at its most basic, just like your professor outlined in your freshman economics course.
2. The petro-toadies in Congress: All we have to do is open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the waters off Florida and California.
3. The Department of Energy: OPEC has to pump more, and we’ve got to allow more refineries by rolling back environmental restrictions.
4. King Abdullah: OPEC pumps plenty of crude but “despicable” oil-futures speculators in the West are driving up the prices due to their “selfishness.”
5. Senator John McCain: Exxon Mobil has done such a good job of demonstrating the magic of the marketplace that it deserves another $1.2 billion in tax breaks.
6. Senator Barack Obama: Impose a windfall-profits tax to remind American oil executives that price gouging can backfire politically.
7. About 90 percent of the print and TV reporters in America: See No. 1. It really is that ol’ devil supply and demand.
8. The White House: Never mind. Nobody’s home.

For my money, a sounder answer as to whom to believe is Don Barlett and Jim Steele, the investigative reporting team that has won two Pulitzers and two National Magazine Awards for exposing government theft and corporate greed. Their 2003 series for Time magazine on oil economics remains required reading for anyone who wants a better understanding of how gas at $4 to $5 a gallon represents a carefully arranged screwing of consumers. “The bottom line for the oil people is, How much can I make while spending the least I can get by with on refineries, synthetic fuels, and for exploration and drilling on the vast, unused acreage in existing oil leases?” Barlett says. He notes that Canada has become the United States’ No. 1 oil supplier by funding joint government-­industry exploration of the tar-sand fields of Alberta. “The most chilling statistic is Exxon Mobil’s. It spent twice as much last year to buy back stock as it did on exploration.”
As for shallow journalism that helps Big Oil, Steele makes the point that the newsrooms that were once staffed by the redistributionist children of the New Deal and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. are now populated with the children of Reaganomics: “Younger reporters come out of a mind-set that the market rules, taxes are evil, and government ought to let these people in the oil industry go about their business.”

As journalism has passed from a hungry to an elite profession, there’s no shock value in the fact that Exxon Mobil paid only $5 billion in U.S. income taxes last year while it paid $25 billion to foreign governments. Even with Exxon Mobil making $76,000 a minute, the last thing that occurs to many assignment editors and reporters is to investigate whether a windfall-profits tax would drive Exxon Mobil, BP, and other oil companies to invest in the alternative-energy strategies they boast about in their television commercials.

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