Hiroko Tabuchi N Y T

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The Art of "Creative Confrontation" Is Alive and Well

Back in the 1970s, legendary Mobil VP Herb Schmertz pioneered the art of bullying journalists or, as he called it, "creative confrontation." If journalists weren't covering Mobil's point of view, or he thought they were being too critical of Mobil, he called them up and let them know. And he let their bosses, and their bosses' bosses know too. Sometimes he threatened to pull advertising. Once he cut The Wall Street Journal off from any information at all—press releases, comments from executives, even quarterly earnings reports.

It looked exactly like what the American Petroleum Institute and Shell tried to do to Hiroko Tabuchi, the New York Times's climate accountability reporter,once in response to a (now-deleted) tweet in which she referenced the shared history of the fossil fuel industry and white supremacy, and again in response to a story about the American Chemistry Council, which counts several oil majors as members, lobbying against regulations in Kenya that would limit the ability of American companies to sell single-use disposable plastic there. If it were only a group of smug flaks congratulating themselves for sending "nastygrams" and saying things like "Let's work on taking away their birthdays next," it would be easy to dismiss as clownish theatrics. But there's quite a bit of evidence that it works. Not just in the 70s and 80s, but today. After telling Tabuchi, in response to her tweet, "we're done," Shell publicist Curtis Smith forwarded his email to her colleague, Clifford Kraus, who he obviously considers a friend, with a note, to which Kraus replied "I obviously can't comment, but you wrote what you felt and that is good."

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Rep Ro Khana (D-Ca), who co-chairs the committee and helped spearhead the investigation, thinks it also worked to pull Tabuchi off of certain types of climate stories. After covering the Committee's hearings on climate disinformation for a year, he says, "Hiroko's not covering it anymore. She's been taken off. So, you know, unfortunately, Big Oil succeeds sometimes when they engage in this kind of bullying."

What this exchange also reveals is the extent to which the API coordinates not just messaging strategy, but also execution, for the industry. After instructing the communications directors for all the oil majors not to engage with Tabuchi on Twitter, Meg Bloomgren, API's senior vice president of communications, explains that she has sent emails to three of Tabuchi's bosses, as well as to the Associate Managing Editor of Standards, about her conduct.

"I encouraged them to do the right thing in addressing Ms. Tabuchi's completely baseless link and offensive accusation," Bloomgren writes. "I also noted that in the meantime, any calls from Ms. Tabuchi to our industry, its executives, or the 10 million workers it supports will likely go unreturned." It's a move straight out of the Schmertz playbook.

Social license to operate is still a big priority...