Climate News Service Pushes Back on Fracking Industry Attack

Our lead story usually focuses on the substance of climate and energy transition. But our ability to find and curate the best, most accurate and timely content depends on a free flow of information. That’s why it’s so important that Pulitzer Prize-winning InsideClimate News, one of our top sources for The Energy Mix, is pushing back after a published attack earlier this week from Energy in Depth, a PR arm of the Independent Petroleum Association of America. Over the last year, ICN and the U.S. Center for Public Integrity have conducted an in-depth investigation of air pollution from unconventional oil and gas operations in Texas. Rather than countering the substance of ICN’s work, Energy in Depth tried to attack their journalistic integrity. “Changing the subject through the production of distractions is a kind of sleight of hand that is the specialty of well-trained public relations professionals, who in America now outnumber journalists four to one,” wrote ICN’s David Sassoon. “But no such thing as an ‘anti-fracking industry’ exists, and [IPAA] provides no evidence that would pass muster in an honest newsroom that it does.”