Consider This from NPR - What Happens When A Powerful Corporation Owns The Local News?

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

When news outlets shut down in a city, that creates what's often called a news desert. But in Richmond, California, NPR's media correspondent David Folkenflik says the situation is more like a news mirage.Energy giant Chevron is the biggest employer - and the biggest polluter in the California city. Chevron also owns the local news site. How does that impact the community there?NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Folkenflik and Miranda Green, director of investigations for the news site Floodlight - about what happens when a major corporation owns the local news.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

For a lot of folks in the city of Richmond, California, the Standard is the news site of choice. A lot of people use Richmond Standard. They do a really good job. Two locals there, Jorge Zono, who helps run his parents' Mexican restaurant, and architect and former city mayor Tom Butt. Others in town, though, like Patricia Dornan, view the Standard with caution. As long as it doesn't have to do with Chevron, it's fine. I don't read any of the articles about how wonderful their company is. The standard is owned by the energy company Chevron, which is Richmond's biggest employer and biggest taxpayer.

Its refinery is also the city's largest polluter. In 2021, a rupture at the Chevron refinery dumped nearly 800 gallons of diesel fuel into the San Francisco Bay. The Standard did not cover that. When black smoke filled the sky last November, the Standard did not report on that either. Denny Kampenthong is a Richmond resident active in the Laotian immigrant community. We don't know the full story, but we know that you shouldn't breathe in the air or be outside for that matter.

Environmental activist Kat Ramos says residents have to rely on word of mouth to know what's happening in their community. In particular because we have to deal with publications like the Richmond Standard that are giving us the opposite of the truth. Consider this. In a volatile media landscape where local news outlets are shrinking or disappearing altogether, we take a look at what happens when a city's most powerful company owns and influences the news. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Consider This from NPR. When news outlets shut down in a city, that creates what is often called a news desert. But in Richmond, California, NPR media correspondent David Fokkenflik says the situation that the energy company Chevron has created by owning the local news outlet is different. The standard has created something of a news mirage. A news mirage. Fokkenflik has been looking at how the standard does or does not cover stories about Chevron

and how those decisions affect the community. He's been doing that in collaboration with Miranda Green, director of investigations for the news site Floodlight, which investigates how corporate and political interests influence climate action. Welcome to you both. Hey, Merluise. Hello. Miranda, you kick us off. Given your newsroom's focus, as I just described it, the focus on the intersection between corporate interests and climate change, how did you land on investigating this particular paper, the Richmond Standard? Yeah, David and I had been looking into kind of this interesting dynamic between areas where there was a shrinking of news, where newsrooms were laying off staff, and where corporate interests were kind of stepping in to

fill in the gap. Now, I do want to note the situation of having a media company owned by somebody with deep pockets, even very deep pockets. This is not rare necessarily today. You can look here in Washington at Jeff Bezos owning The Post. You could look at Elon Musk buying X, formerly Twitter. You could look at the acquisition of the Baltimore Sun by the chair of the conservative local TV group Sinclair Broadcast. You can look at Rupert Murdoch and everything that he owns. I mean, how, David, does the Chevron media ownership model, how does it differ from all those examples I just listed? Let's leave Elon Musk aside. But the real difference is that these are journalistic operations, which has sense of a mission.

Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, but he's not getting involved in editorial policies, what stories to pick to make Amazon or himself look better. No, in fact, he has deliberately drawn a bright line and told newsroom editors, I don't want to know. I'm not getting involved in your editorial decisions. That's right. And also, the desire is not simply to tell people about their communities, as important that is, but to embody that and personify that with a journalistic mission, that is to hold powerful figures, at times including Jeff Bezos, to account, to hold powerful institutions at times including Amazon to account. And that's true in Boston, the Boston Globe. These are efforts where they hope these to be viable financial operations on their own, not simply serving a corporate interest apart from the newsroom. Miranda, are there other situations that are comparable to Chevron and the standard? Yes, actually, in the reporting that David and I were looking into, and I ultimately ended up reporting for The Guardian, we found a really similar situation where this happened in Alabama.

Alabama Power is the state's largest utility and found out that it actually started a newspaper called the Alabama News Center. And the News Center is, you know, it looks like a website. It runs good news of the state. That's what it promotes it as. But what I actually found out in my reporting of that is, you know, it looked to Chevron when it launched this news website a year later, specifically as this is a way that instead of, you know, pitching our news to reporters to try to get them to write positively about our company, our utility, we're just going to create our own website, hire former reporters and PR folks to run it, and write about the good news of Alabama

positively about our company and kind of avoid any criticism. Well, let's just call out the elephant in the room here. And going back to Chevron and what's happening in Richmond, California, I mean, y'all have detailed, we just heard some instances where the standard didn't report on pollution that Chevron had caused. Miranda, what are the stakes? The stakes are high here. I mean, this is a community of 110,000 people in a port town just north of San Francisco. And it's largely a minority community of Hispanic individuals, working class families. And Chevron is the largest employer of this community and has been for decades now. And

it's still in the news frequently. Actually, just in the last couple of months, Chevron has been known for flaring events. It recently just got a $20 million fine, the largest fine that the Air District has put in the history of the area because of the air pollution that it's put up in the community. And yet, so many of those events that are important to those locals are not being covered by the Richmond Standard. They're not being covered by the Richmond Standard. They're not being covered in the only paper that is essentially a daily paper for the locals in the community, which you can imagine has a lot of repercussions for those that are trying to figure out what's going on, especially when they see, you know, fire in the air.

Well, indeed. And what are their options? Are there alternative news sources if people in Richmond want to know what is actually happening with the town's biggest employer? environmental essentially wrongs or the San Francisco Chronicle or some regional papers, but they're not showing up at the city council meetings on a regular basis. They're not on the streets in a regular way. Residents tell us that they talk to one another. One woman told us that she used to go to bars frequented by Chevron employees and retirees just to sort of talk them up, see what was going on. Another guy who was active in the Laotian community there said that they would talk to family members and extended families and just hear what was happening. When there was an oil spill on the water, they learned about it

from a resident who spotted it. That was in the official report. And Chevron acknowledged this to be the case. It wasn't released by the company. So whether it's labor strikes or new questions of taxations, they might learn about it from public officials. But there's not really a dedicated news organization doing that, even as a couple of mom-and-pop websites have popped up here and there to try to fill in the gaps. David, that prompts me to circle back to the idea of news mirages versus news deserts. You've called what the standard has created a news mirage. I mean, neither a news mirage nor a news desert is ideal, but which is worse?

I guess it's worse for me at a distance to have the idea of a news mirage, something that's fooling you. I will say that the residents that we talked to, some distance to have the idea of a news mirage, something that's fooling you. I will say that the residents that we talked to, some of them appreciated the value of having stories about street closings or street fairs or about a local concert or a story about the marching band at the high school. These are things that are a little bit of the texture of the life of a city like Richmond as well, right? And you want those things to exist. At the same time, the cost is a distorted reality, a bit of a Truman Show understanding of the community you're living in.

You are directed to things that are of value to Chevron in a way of things that in some ways might detract from your faith in Chevron as a good neighbor and a good actor. And with the health concerns there, with the questions of what the appropriate amount of money to be funneling to the city and the environs there, you know, there are all kinds of vital questions that are front of mind for a lot of people who live there and yet absent from the news outlets they consume.

And let me just add, too, that these, in our reporting, we found that these news mirages are growing. You know, if you just look to we have found that these news mirages are growing. You know, if you just look to Chevron, for example, what they are doing with the Richmond Standard is just one of many new-seeming websites that they have launched that we found in our reporting. So they have actually three newspapers that they run in Ecuador, which is an area where they have faced heavy litigation over their assets. And they also most recently launched a newspaper in the Permian Basin in West Texas and New Mexico called Permian Proud, where they are trying to, you know, again, cover good news of the area while also, you know, trying to get positive feedback from the residents and obviously the lawmakers that they need to

ingrain themselves with as they continue to try to, you know, push their interests. And so this is something that we're seeing, you know, across the board in many different communities, these ideas of these news mirages cropping up these. And I think it's something that we will continue to see as we keep digging. Well, so big picture, what are the implications? With local newspapers shrinking or dying, with layoffs at big legacy news companies, including here at NPR, but also the Washington Post and CNN and the LA Times and I could go on, what are the implications of this model? it's a warning call. It's like a cannonball being fired into the harbor for all of us to be aware of this is a potential, not a certain, but a potential harbinger of the future. That is that there could be corporate ownership of news outlets that are serving not their communities, not their citizens, not their readers and viewers and listeners, but of their corporate owners directly for the bottom line, that these newspapers are investments, not in ongoing concerns and serving the mission of transparency, accountability and understanding, but the mission of, in this case, the shareholders of the Chevron company. David Fokenflik is NPR's media correspondent, and Miranda Green is director of investigations for the news site Floodlight.

Thanks to you both for your reporting. You bet. Thank you. This episode was produced by Mark Rivers. It was edited by William Troop and Pallavi Gogol. Our executive producer is Sammy Yinnigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.