{"id":1056,"date":"2026-09-11T04:16:38","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T04:16:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=1056"},"modified":"2026-09-11T04:16:38","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T04:16:38","slug":"big-oils-origin-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=1056","title":{"rendered":"Big Oil\u2019s Origin Story"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

We live in a time, the journalist Amy Westervelt laments in her new book, Brought to You By<\/em>, when \u201cmillions of people have been convinced that it is patriotic to be antidemocracy [and] that doctors are not to be trusted but podcasters are.\u201d In theory, democracy calls for citizens to inform themselves of various points of view to be debated. If that ideal of democracy were a reality today, government policies on climate change (and many other issues) would be very different, given that 80 to 89 percent of the world\u2019s people want their governments to take stronger climate action.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Read more The Right-Wing Attacks on Abdul El-Sayed Keep Faltering<\/a><\/p>\n

The chaotic media landscape doesn\u2019t help. Most people in that 80 to 89 percent supermajority actually think they\u2019re a minority: After all, that\u2019s the message they get from news and social media, where \u201cclimate hushing\u201d and climate denial are pervasive. It\u2019s hard for the public to live up to democracy\u2019s credo when they are engulfed by a ceaseless avalanche of information, much of it unreliable, misleading, or false.<\/p>\n

How did we get here? And what can be done about it? Amy Westervelt began grappling with these questions while reporting groundbreaking expos\u00e9s of the fossil-fuel industry\u2019s efforts to hide and deny the scientific fact that its products dangerously overheat the planet. (Disclosure: Westervelt is on the steering committee of the global journalism network Covering Climate Now, which I cofounded.) Brought to You By<\/em> tells what Westervelt presents as the origin story of Big Oil\u2019s deceptions. It\u2019s a deeper story that must be reckoned with, she argues, in order to comprehend today\u2019s dizzying information system and replace it with a system that serves democracy and, with it, climate survival.<\/p>\n

A self-described \u201chistory nerd\u201d whose \u201chappy place\u201d is inside library archives, Westervelt opens her narrative by recounting how the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry\u2019s US trade association, came into being. During World War I, a PR man named Ivy Lee worked behind the scenes to get oil companies to cooperate rather than compete and thus ensure a steady supply of oil for the war. \u201cAs the war drew to a close,\u201d Westervelt writes, \u201cLee thought\u2026if normally competing companies could coordinate on production and supply during the war, why not work together in peacetime to keep prices high and regulation low?\u201d The API\u2019s first official meeting took place in Washington barely six months after the fighting ended.<\/p>\n

Lee and his colleague Edward Bernays are now regarded as the fathers of modern public relations. Although they pioneered the use of press releases and other now-common techniques, their fundamental innovation was to play offense. Instead of avoiding the press, as companies traditionally had done, Lee and Bernays gave the press the stories that they <\/em>wanted told. Their clients in the oil, coal, railroad, auto, tobacco, and chemical industries duly saw their preferred versions of reality reflected in the news that the public and policymakers heard.<\/p>\n

Westervelt details how the pivotal insight of playing offense gave rise over the ensuing century to a globe-straddling system of \u201cinformation pollution.\u201d Today, she argues, PR is the delivery mechanism for messaging that draws on \u201cuniversity research co-opted by corporate funding and further eroded by think tanks,\u201d such as the Heritage Foundation, which authored the Project 2025 blueprint that the second Trump administration has sought to implement. Fox and other right-wing media outlets \u201chave been used to normalize it all,\u201d she adds, and \u201ctechnology has flooded the zone and made it impossible to get away from.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBullshit,\u201d she declares when demolishing the counterargument that these monied interests are simply exercising their right to free speech. She notes that US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes\u2019s landmark opinions distinguished between \u201cthe right to speak,\u201d which should be protected, and \u201cthe right to mislead,\u201d which shouldn\u2019t. But a century later, that distinction was erased by the court\u2019s 2010 Citizens United<\/em> ruling, which equated money with speech and, in Westervelt\u2019s words, \u201cgave corporations the right to shout over everyone else.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Read more The Embarrassment of Trump\u2019s Midterms Convention<\/a><\/p>\n

One anecdote in her book resonates with a more philosophical argument about the environmental crisis presented in the journalist Jason Dove Mark\u2019s new book, The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore the Planet<\/em>. Mark explores a concept that scientists call \u201cshifting baseline syndrome.\u201d In a world of rapid change, humans often don\u2019t realize that today\u2019s environmental conditions are quite different\u2014usually worse\u2014than past conditions. He uses the example of monarch butterflies, whose miraculous migrations from Mexico used to paint trees in California orange with their density but which, in recent years, have dwindled to almost nothing. When novice observers took comfort in sighting some monarchs in their yard, a veteran monitor of the butterflies\u2019 migrations asked, \u201cLike, tens of thousands?\u201d No, the novices replied, only \u201ca few.\u201d The monitor asked, \u201cDo you remember when you used to see ten thousand?\u201d<\/p>\n

Collective amnesia about deteriorating conditions is also seen in social systems. Just as it\u2019s become hard \u201cto remember what summers were like before the nonstop sizzling heat\u201d of recent years, Mark writes, it is now difficult \u201cto remember social life before social media\u2026. [And] the once-outrageous\u2014the bilious, hateful rhetoric and the creeping authoritarianism\u2014have become almost ordinary.\u201d<\/p>\n

Westervelt quotes a university professor who unknowingly proves the point. Teaching an undergrad class on media and politics, the professor asked her students to cite their sources. \u201cTheir answers were things like Twitter or Instagram or TikTok,\u201d she recalls. \u201cAnd I said, \u2018No, no, I don\u2019t mean where you saw it. I mean the original source.\u2019 And they really didn\u2019t know what I was talking about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Westervelt hastens to add that if people are confused it is \u201cnot because they\u2019re idiots\u2014they\u2019re not!\u201d It\u2019s because they\u2019ve never been taught to think critically about how \u201cthe information around them is being shaped by forces they don\u2019t see.\u201d She singles out \u201cthe tech bros [who], armed with algorithms and data, take Lee\u2019s quote about facts being open to interpretation and turn it into millions of splintered realities\u201d and thus wage \u201can information war against their own people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Real journalism\u2014the rigorous, fair-minded gathering of facts and the public distribution of a coherent narrative\u2014is an antidote to the confusion fostered by today\u2019s information pollution. This September 28, hundreds of the world\u2019s news organizations will mark World News Day by proclaiming: \u201cA single message: Trusted journalism matters.\u201d That message, like Earth Day\u2019s, is one that deserves attention every day of the year.<\/p>\n

Read more Imani Thompson\u2019s Grad-School Thriller<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Nation Magazine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1055,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nBig Oil\u2019s Origin Story - Atlas Living Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=1056\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Big Oil\u2019s Origin Story - Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Nation Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=1056\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-09-11T04:16:38+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=1056#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=1056\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/f6233854b1f92a6d21147fe5d5e58abc\"},\"headline\":\"Big Oil\u2019s Origin Story\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-11T04:16:38+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=1056\"},\"wordCount\":1127,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=1056#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/6dbc9ece758cc3a3563bc79d77936cc9.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"News\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=1056#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=1056\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=1056\",\"name\":\"Big Oil\u2019s Origin Story - 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