05-13-09 by dugan
If you go to YouTube and search for "Chevron 60 Minutes," the first three results look like the image at left. Two of them are a real and tough "60 Minutes" report on Chevron’s liability for toxic pollution of the Ecuadorean Amazon by Texaco, which Chevron took over. The top search result, though, is a 14-minute Chevron production, mimicking the real journalism of the "60 Minutes" report. Chevron is never ID’d as the video’s producer, and former CNN reporter Gene Randall offers no hint that Chevron employed him. Even the video’s tag at the bottom says just "TexacoEcuador."
The video’s description is "Go Behind the Scenes of the 60 Minutes story about Chevron," implying that it’s backstory from "60 Minutes" about its May 3 broadcast. Yet "60 Minutes" is never mentioned in the video. (If you search for "Chevron Ecuador," the same video is the top result, but with different headlines and no mention of "60 Minutes".
And YouTube (owned by Google) let Chevron guarantee that the look-alike fake-news video would appear as the top result of my search. It’s worse than the LA Times letting NBC put a (far more obviously) fake news report on its front page. At least the Times "story" had the NBC logo at the top.
Randall, a former CNN correspondent, told the New York Times “Chevron hired me to tell its side of the story. That’s what I did.” If Randall had said those words at the beginning of the video, he might have kept a shred of his reputation. Maybe Chevron’s pay was a soul-selling amount, for five months of work begun as soon as Chevron knew that "60 Minutes" was planning a story. Randall is identified only as "Gene Randall reporting."
What he did is to reporting as deep-fried Twinkies are to food.
The video "interviews" five academic types identified as "Chevron experts," as in experts on Chevron, defending the company in measured tones. But they’re paid consultants to Chevron, which is the successor company to Texaco. (It’s even more blatant than the Exxon-funded academics who denied global warming). And here’s the Chevron video’s most absurd, LOL claim: The toxic water and ground pollution in the Amazon couldn’t have harmed people, because the region’s population has increased.
Chevron turned off the comment function on the video, so it knew it would be outed and trashed. I wonder how many of the more than 4,000 page viewers (as of today) got it that the is joke on them.