Nina-Bytes: When Chevron Owns Your News

Editor’s note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web. Want more? Click here to subscribe to NIDC today. 

 

Controlling the Narrative

As I’ve written in the past, one of the reasons capitalist, for profit media cannot be trusted to objectively cover the climate crisis is because capitalism itself is the force actively roasting our shared biosphere. When the same guys who own and invest in the oil and gas companies turning the planet to ash for profit, own and invest in corporate news organizations that utterly dominate the media landscape in the Pig Empire, they have an obvious vested interest in keeping you in the dark about how bad the problem really is, and what the simplest solution to that problem might be; namely, ending capitalism. Mostly, this is a sort of second-hand relationship that works through the machinations of class sympathies and mutual objectives among ruling class capitalists whose way of life affords them both immense wealth and significant power in our society, which is why despite this billionaire class solidarity, some useful reporting on climate catastrophe and its causes does occasionally trickle down to the public.

What happens however when an oil company that’s actively poisoning your community, literally owns the only news website in town? As the residents of Richmond, California can attest, the answer is “nothing good for the environment or the everyday people in the community at all.” In this March 28th, 2024 article published on NPR, David Folkenflik and Miranda Green explore how one of the most destructive oil and gas companies in America, Chevron, has transformed the city’s primary local news source, The Richmond Standard, into its own private PR firm:

 

Chevron Owns This City’s News Site. Many Stories Aren’t Told

“The city’s primary local news source, The Richmond Standard, didn’t cover the flare. Nor had it reported on a 2021 Chevron refinery pipeline rupture that dumped nearly 800 gallons of diesel fuel into San Francisco Bay.

Chevron is the city’s largest employer, largest taxpayer and largest polluter. Yet when it comes to writing about Chevron, The Richmond Standard consistently toes the company line.

And there’s a reason for that: Chevron owns The Richmond Standard.”

 

As the article indicates, this seemingly local story sits on the fault lines of multiple crises influencing not just what news gets reported in our media, but what the purposes of for profit media organizations even are in the first place. Media consolidation, the emergence of news deserts as local papers are bought up and gutted by venture capital firms, and the warping influence of giant corporate entities are all important factors that have allowed a company like Chevron to not only hide their environmental carnage from the people of Richmond, but also to tell those very same people how to think about the corporate oil and gas giant that dominates almost every aspect of life in their city. Indeed, in Richmond the lines between news and public relations are so blurred that the day to day operations of the paper are actually run by a public relations firm that works for Chevron. This isn’t news, it’s corporate propaganda; and in Richmond, California, the Standard is literally the only game in town.

Furthermore, this corporate dominance of traditional media outlets isn’t merely a fact of life in one California defacto “company town.” All across America, newspapers, television stations, and media outlets are increasingly coming under the control of powerful, politically motivated corporate entities that see controlling the news primarily as a way to further their often monstrous political and financial objectives. Pro-fascist media corporations like Fox and Sinclair Media have spent the past two decades buying up local media organizations all over the country, and transforming those news outlets into a journalistic mockery that spouts nothing but right wing, pro-corporate, anti-worker propaganda; because controlling the narrative, helps them control political life in the Pig Empire in ways that allow reactionary billionaires across multiple industries to rake in unheard of profits while the world literally burns.

The plain truth here is that Chevron isn’t running The Richmond Standard as its own private PR firm because there’s good money to be made in selling the news. They’re publishing their own news website because there’s oodles of money to be made in keeping people ignorant and complacent while a giant oil company poisons their community and boils the planet like soup. Chevron is more than happy to lose money on producing a digital newspaper so long as they can use it to keep local citizens from asking too many questions and exercising their collective democratic power to stop the company from literally killing them (and everyone else on this rock) for profit. When pumping out lies and propaganda are merely the cost of doing business for a multi-billion dollar oil company, what hope do underfunded community journalists and labor class bloggers really have of keeping people informed in an ongoing class war with life or death stakes? If corporations like Chevron have their way, the answer will be “none.”

 

– Nina Illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.

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