I Read It In the Paper, So It Must Be True!
Is #fakenews a thing? That depends on what you mean by "fake". And on what you mean by "news".
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I Read It In the Paper, So It Must Be True!
In my news feed a few weeks ago was a New York Times story headlined "Rupert Murdoch’s Australia News Outlets to Ease Their Climate Denial". Several paragraphs in, the first scientist asked for comment said, "Color me skeptical."
Yeah, me too.
Many people don't understand how to evaluate the legitimacy of "news" they encounter via the Internet and social media (including direct messages from friends, colleagues and acquaintances). And at the root of #fakenews is bias. The Murdoch media empire has long been an apologist for the fossil fuel industry, which in 2020 spent a reported $112,132,376 on lobbying in the United States alone.
In 2017, the nonprofit, nonpartisan, Pulitzer Prize-winning organization Inside Climate News wrote, "The industry sowed doubt for decades about climate science, spending $2.9 billion on advocacy advertising alone in a 10-year period ending in 2015. It spent $1.3 billion more lobbying to shape public policy on energy issues during the same period and has pumped out $827.9 million in campaign contributions since 2000 to elect sympathetic officials at the local, state and federal levels."
A better headline for the Times story would have been "Rupert Murdoch’s Australia News Outlets Claim They Will Ease Their Climate Denial".
In my feed the same weekend I read about Rupert Murdoch's plans to "pivot" and save the world, was a post from The Economist's Finance & Economics columnist that was questionably headlined "Sustainable investing faces the beginnings of a backlash".
Providing obvious inspiration for the headline, the writer suggested that sustainable investing is facing "the first signs of a backlash." He continued, "The answers to two uncomfortable questions remain elusive. Are supposedly virtuous funds investing in appropriately virtuous companies? And is what these financial do-gooders are trying to pull off even such a good idea?"
The first question, of course, is of great concern to sustainability-focused investors (and most other residents of our planet). "Greenwashing" is the practice of claiming to operate with an environmental focus while continuing with practices that are decidedly unsustainable. Unfortunately, most consumers have neither the ability nor the time to verify corporate sustainability claims, and until someone (a media outlet, a climate-focused NGO) exposes the perfidy, corporate greenwashing works.
The second question, though, was typical Economist. Rephrased, the magazine's columnist asked, "Is sustainability-focused investing a good idea?" If you're a regular reader of The Economist, you know their editorial slant is extremely pro-business. If there is a human angle to a story, they don't get it. They simply don't understand that many issues are profoundly influenced by human actions.
As an example, The Economist is strongly in favor of free markets. "Let the market decide!" As a result, they are strongly opposed to market and industry regulation. "No need!" If you don't believe markets and industries need regulation, you very likely work in fossil fuel extraction or Big Tech or finance or ... one of many other industries.
The Economist writer pointed out – correctly – that supposedly virtuous funds often are not investing in appropriately virtuous companies.
But he then wondered, can cash could be used both to generate a profit, and improve the state of the world?
Or is it that "investors chasing virtuousness are, at best, deluding themselves and, at worst, doing more harm than good?"
Here's where The Economist's writer tried to make his point. He cited a three-part blog post published by Tariq Fancy, a former Chief Investment Officer for Sustainable Investing at BlackRock, quoting six of Fancy's over 23,000 words to conclude that ESG investing merely “answers inconvenient truths with convenient fantasies”.
He then manipulated Fancy’s argument to suit his and the magazine’s anti-regulation, pro-markets agenda, writing, “[Sustainable investment] merely promotes the dangerous illusion that business can lead the way on fighting, say, climate change or racism … Prioritising a CEO’s statements on Black Lives Matter over the viability of her investment plans is a recipe for poor returns and a flabby corporate sector.”
What Fancy actually wrote was that ESG marketing is a distraction from real-world sustainability measures that militate against the effects of climate change. He noted that “the marketing gobbledygook — is actively misleading people and drowning out the experts’ warnings [about climate change].”
The bit that doesn’t fit with The Economist’s world view (and which their columnist didn’t report) came at the end:
“The goal of this essay is to clearly communicate the dire need for urgent government action to address systemic problems ...”
"There’s no question there are many problems that governments cannot solve, and in which its involvement can muck things up and erode efficiency. But climate change, inequality, building a truly inclusive economy, and a wide range of other issues under the “sustainability” umbrella have something in common with alien invasions and global pandemics: they are broad, systemic problems for which we require shared, systemic solutions that must be decided through democratic processes.
“To address the pandemic, governments followed expert advice, flattening the curve by restricting travel, closing high-risk venues, and making masks mandatory indoors. To bend down the greenhouse gas emissions curve, governments should immediately adjust system-wide market incentives, such as replacing fossil fuel subsidies with a price on carbon, and institute new performance standards to guide industry, such as vehicle emissions limits and energy efficiency standards for buildings ... to help us avoid the more extreme and unpredictable warming scenarios, governments must implement a version of ‘Operation Warp Speed’ for new technologies that address the climate crisis, including investing in base research in key areas and creating the incentives for private industry to invest in renewable power and technologies that remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it underground.
“We need political leaders who are competent, evidence-based, and sufficiently non-partisan to focus primarily on how we can fix the rules of the game. Most politicians and business leaders would agree with this if they only first accepted a key prerequisite that many have been avoiding for many years now: creating the systemic change we claim to seek means shedding a love affair that has persisted for decades with the illusion that, left to its own devices, the market will magically serve the long-term public interest. The market will not solve rampant and rising inequality all by itself. Nor will the market somehow self-regulate to solve the problem of climate change — a ludicrous idea, given that climate change is widely considered the greatest market failure the world has ever seen. It’s time we all finally accept that only a supreme, overarching authority with democratic legitimacy can and should be leading the way in coordinating our efforts to solve these problems, beginning with uncomfortable rule changes — ones that don’t all have to be bad for business, but can certainly no longer remain business as usual.”
If you know The Economist’s editorial point of view, you understand why its writer left these paragraphs (and almost everything else Fancy had to say) out of his column.
Over time I have carefully built a portfolio (and daily/weekly feed) of information sources I trust. Some sources I have been reading for decades; others I have added more recently. I consider very carefully before I add new information sources because like you, the amount of time I can allocate to newsreading is limited (though I very probably read more than you).
First, I ask myself if the story is news or opinion (opinion and analysis have value, often a great deal of value, but they are different from fact). Second, I ask myself, "Who is saying this?" An important aspect of "Who is saying this?" is "Who is paying?" Third, I look to make sure the writer has looked at the story from all possible angles. Fourth, as important as what's in the story is what's not in the story.
News is biased because people are biased. And it's important to remember that most news outlets are businesses.
No one knows this better than Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire has long been used not to distribute “news” but to wield (political and economic) influence. Will Murdoch’s media outlets “ease their climate denial”? Only if it makes good business sense to do so.