New Research: The Advertorials Many Media Outlets Make for Oil Companies Are Misleading, But They Don't Have to Be

We have covered before how the fossil fuel industry created the advertorial and how it continues work with media on the modern incarnation: sponsored content, created by the media outlets themselves. To be clear, it’s outlets’ internal brand studios that write op-eds, craft slide shows and videos, and produce podcasts for fossil fuel companies, not their editorial staff. But these services are explicitly marketed as a way to make corporate content mirror the editorial content in style and approach, and when it comes to fossil fuel advertisers it often directly contradicts what the editorial staff is reporting. In late 2023, we published a report detailing the many examples of this and delving into the peer-reviewed research that shows how misleading this practice is to readers.

This week, one of the researchers who has contributed the most to that body of evidence, Dr. Michelle Amazeen, at Boston University, published a new study looking at why this practice is particularly misleading on social media, and what media outlets might be able to do to make it less so. She joins us to speak about that research.

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