One of the more troubling aspects of the fraud effort concocted against Chevron is how, early on, media big wigs made it a cause célèbre, and how prestigious attention proved critical to the fleecing scheme (until it collapsed). The big “get” that legitimized the ensuing media pile-in (by Newsweek, Bloomberg, the BBC, the New York Times, and 60 Minutes, to name a few) was the 2007 Vanity Fair essay by William Langewiesche, which at great length accused Chevron (and its corporate predecessor, Texaco) of creating a “toxic waste dump” in the jungles of Ecuador in the 1970s and 80s.
The Fifth Estate had spoken: Bringing the oil giant to its knees and turning it into an ATM for leftists was now sanctioned.
But as Chevron fought back in a successful RICO action against lefty lawyer Steven Donziger, and uncovered a massive multi-billion-dollar shakedown operation (with a cast including hedge firms and soon-to-be-devastated lobbying firms), the initial media reports increasingly came across as shallow, contrived, ideological, and featuring little editorial due diligence or fact-checking.
Indeed, court documents from the RICO trial have “exposed some very unsettling secrets about the way the journalistic sausage is made at the elite house organs of the chattering classes.” At least that’s how Miami Herald columnist Glenn Garvin sees it in a powerful piece — “When Journalism Is Too Good To Be True” — published last week about Vanity Fair’s Langewiesche. Garvin writes:
Four years into the lawsuit, Donziger scored a public-relations coup when he convinced the magazine Vanity Fair to do a long story about the case. (Department of Extraordinary Coincidences: Donziger’s wife at the time worked in corporate communications at Condé Nast, the magazine’s publisher.)
Vanity Fair assigned the story to one of its best writers, the award-winning William Langewiesche. The piece he produced was extraordinarily sympathetic to the lawsuit, so much so that Donziger himself proclaimed it “the kind of paradigm-shifting, breakthrough article that I think is going to change the entire case from here until it ends in a way that is favorable to us.”
And no wonder! The emails between Donziger and Langewiesche in early 2007, as the story was being prepared, show Langewiesche as Donziger’s camp follower at the best of times, his sock-puppet at the worst.
Garvin goes on to report that Langewiesche worked with Donziger to prepare questions to ask Chevron, for advice on dodging requests from Chevron officials for a face-to-face meeting, to review his story before it was published, and much more. (You can read Langewiesche’s response to Garvin’s column here.)
That the liberal media is biased ain’t news. Still, what we are seeing in this bald move from bias to active and coordinated participation with fraud operations should unsettle anyone. If Chevron (albeit at great expense) has done itself a service in fighting back against fraud, it has also done everyone a collateral service by exposing the highbrow media’s overt cooperation with the Left.