NPR’s David Folkenflik reported this story with Miranda Green of Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates hard-line interests blocking climate action.
RICHMOND, Calif. — Open flames erupted from four smokestacks at the Chevron refinery west of Richmond, California. Soon, black smoke covered the sky.
The news spread temporarily that day last November, albeit by word of mouth, said Denny Khamphanthong, a 29-year-old Richmond resident. “We don’t know the whole story, but we know that you shouldn’t breathe the air or be outside,” Khamphanthong says now. “It would be great to have a real media outlet go by and find out everything for themselves. “
The city’s main local news source, The Richmond Standard, covered the outbreak. It also failed to report a 2021 Chevron refinery pipeline rupture that spilled about 800 gallons of diesel fuel into the San Francisco Bay Area.
Chevron is the city’s largest employer, largest taxpayer and polluter. However, when it comes to writing about Chevron, The Richmond Standard consistently toes the company’s line.
And here’s why: Chevron owns the Richmond Standard.
“If you take a look at Chevron and Richmond Standard, a lot of the data is copied and pasted,” says Katt Ramos, a local weather activist. “They provide a very skewed point of view that is bought and paid for through Chevron. “
The very name of the site evokes the history of Chevron, created when John D. Rockefeller dismantled it through federal offenders more than a century ago. The Richmond Standard prides itself on being the “premier source of local and network information” about the city. .
In the city, in coffee shops, in an architect’s office, in a Mexican restaurant, and even at a National Park Service on the waterfront, the Standard is identified as the number one source of data about the city. Tell stories about charity drives and street closures. New bars and art exhibitions. Youth soccer events, local concerts, and protection initiatives.
Decades ago, the city relied on the Richmond Independent and the San Francisco Chronicle to report on the community. And then a familiar trend in the U. S. was revealed. U. S. The Chronicle withdrew. The Independent has become part of a newspaper near Berkeley, which closed in 1984. Newspapers in other East Bay towns withered. Today, the city’s media landscape is ruled by its main corporate forces.
Markets where media outlets are closed are known as data deserts. The Standard has created a kind of media mirage: stories are told, but with an agenda. Facts that Chevron doesn’t like are omitted; Hard truths thirst. The company seeks to convey its point of view and prove that it can be trusted.
Recently, on a February afternoon, a City Council meeting continuously focused on developments related to Chevron. Not a single journalist showed up, not even those from NPR and Floodlight.
The same San Francisco public relations firm that manages the Standard for Chevron is managing a similar project on advances in the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico, where Chevron has major business interests. He also manages one of the company’s businesses in Ecuador, where the energy giant has withstood decades of litigation.
Chevron’s attempt to speak out publicly comes as efforts to combat climate change threaten the fossil fuel industry, specifically in California. State regulators would ban the sale of gasoline-powered cars until 2035. They published the world’s first plan to achieve net-zero carbon emissions. contamination. Other states and countries have followed similar goals.
In February, Chevron disclosed that it was suffering a loss of approximately $1. 8 billion on its assets, mostly in California, due to a stricter regulatory climate in the state. Chevron is headquartered in San Ramon, about 35 miles southeast of Richmond, though the company has moved most of its workforce to Texas.
“The company saw a need to provide the network with more Richmond media policies, which had been largely ignored by the mainstream media, with the exception of crime stories,” said Braden Reddall, Chevron’s director of external affairs. Citizens will tell you that the web has much more to offer than what the mainstream media says and reports. It’s a proud network, full of attractive people doing attractive things. “
Other media outlets are more than adequately covering Chevron, added Reddall, who in the past covered the company for the foreign news service Reuters.
Patricia Dornan, a longtime Richmond resident, says she chooses what she reads in the Standard.
“If it’s perceived to be a Chevron-Standard Oil perspective, that’s fine because most of the products they offer have nothing to do with them,” says Dornan, a retired school teacher. It has nothing to do with Chevron, that’s fine. I don’t read any articles that describe how glorious their company is.
Dornan volunteers at World War II Rosie the Riveter National Historical Park. She tells visitors about the wonders of wartime American production and the women welders in Richmond who were to build warships in 51 days instead of two years.
His grandmother moved to the city in 1905, just three years after the refinery opened, and his circle of relatives has been there ever since. One of the streets in the city is named after his father. She says Richmond can’t function without Chevron, but that a true local media outlet would help hold her accountable to the community.
When he needs to know what Chevron is doing, Dornan says, “I ask my retired friends at the refinery: what’s going on?
When it was introduced in 2014, the Standard proclaimed, “Richmond deserves more media coverage. “
“For the first time in more than 30 years, Richmond will have a community-focused news feed committed to shining a light on the positive things happening in the community,” the site announced.
Chevron spends the Standard as an investment in the Richmond community. The public relations firm that runs the Standard wrote, “This would tell stories that other media outlets no longer had the resources to tell. “
But all the stories.
A recent study found that the Richmond Standard had published 434 articles about its owner, Chevron, since the site’s inception. Eight articles refer to burning incidents. None cite oil spills. Most of the stories that mention Chevron focus on profiles, award ceremonies, networking projects and celebrations held during Black History and Hispanic Heritage Months.
When Bay Area air pollutant regulators won historic concessions from Chevron in February to settle a lawsuit, they won a “decisive victory. “The San Jose Mercury News headline cited “$20 million in fines for hundreds of air quality violations. “
The Richmond Standard is more reserved: “Chevron’s deal with Air District is good for the environment and energy. “
The article obviously does not describe the essence of the dispute. The words “fine” and “penalty” do not appear. Attentive readers might have figured out what happened: The outlet described a $20 million deal that “solidifies the future of power generation at the Richmond refinery. “
“There’s a lot of media around the Bay Area covering the refinery,” said Reddall, the Chevron spokesman. “The Standard seeks to fill in the gaps. From where I’m from, I don’t think it’s a refinery that I don’t communicate about.
The lines between city and business are blurring in this predominantly working-class city of 115,000 people, nearly a portion of whom are Latino. The tech boom of neighboring Silicon Valley and the opulence of neighboring Marin County seem like far-flung universes.
The mascot of the best public school is the Oilers. The streets are called Ammonia, Petrolite, and Xileno. La Chevron pipe network, the low cooling ponds, and even the sulfuric stench have elements that define the character of the city. An herb park where egrets and hummingbirds frolic next to the nearly 3,000-acre refinery: a vast reservoir of chimneys, pipes and tanks.
Chevron, which posted profits of $21. 3 billion last year, has played a major role in Richmond for decades. This provides jobs for the city, but most of Chevron’s workers live elsewhere. It will pay about $50 million a year to Richmond, more than a year. one-sixth of the city’s annual revenue.
The company’s relationship with Richmond deteriorated dramatically in 2012. An explosion at the refinery injured 19 employees. The air pollutants resulting from the resulting commercial smokestack were visible for miles around. In the days that followed, 15,000 Bay Area citizens visited medical facilities for respiratory complications.
State and local prosecutors have charged Chevron with criminal negligence and other crimes; The company has settled six fees without opposition, paying approximately $10 million to affected residents, agencies and local hospitals. Chevron also paid $5 million to the city of Richmond to settle a separate civil lawsuit.
At the time of the incident, political sentiment in Richmond began to drift away from the company. As the months passed, progressives threatened to take control of city government. They were selling a long-term lease without refineries, just as Chevron was seeking approval from city officials for a major task to renovate and modernize it.
As we approach the 2014 election cycle, Chevron has taken steps to make its voice heard. He promised massive investment in scholarships and public fitness programs.
Chevron has also spent $3 million to boost pro-industry candidates. They all lost. ” The election has become a referendum on Chevron,” said Tom Butt, then a city council member who won the mayoral election.
Chevron introduced The Richmond Standard that year.
From the beginning, the company revealed its involvement. In small print at the top of its homepage, it says “Financed through Chevron. “
After the election, the Standard published a full 428-word report from Chevron protecting the company’s moves and criticizing the city’s new leaders. “The question in Richmond is: Will local leaders recognize that business is integral to the city’s success?Chevron’s text reads: Or will city leaders continue to oppose efforts to generate growth, preferring to see the business climate – and the prosperity generated by business assistance – decline?
Katt Ramos, who is helping lead the bankruptcy of Communities for a Better Environment in Richmond, organizes tours to demonstrate what she says is Chevron’s destructive legacy. It also illustrates what happens when independent local news disappears.
He stops at the Peres K-8 school in the Iron Triangle, a nickname derived from the three railroad tracks that intersect here. The older youngsters play soccer in a box with a coach while the younger ones have fun on a playground. Beyond the school fence, the Chevron plant is less than a mile away. A sign next to the front of the school warns of a shallow pipe of harmful liquid coming from the refinery and warns that it should be dug into.
“Nothing that is normalized in the formative years is normalized in Richmond,” Ramos says. Adults have to tell youngsters they can’t play outdoors because of the high number of bad weather days, he says.
Perhaps the most productive way to gauge the severity of those considerations is to take a look at children’s admissions to emergency rooms for asthma, says Anne Kelsey Lamb, who oversees asthma studies for the Oakland Institute of Public Health. Children in the Iron Triangle zip code, which includes the refinery as well as the neighborhoods surrounding Peres School, are admitted for emergency asthma care at a rate three times higher than California as a whole. (The institute provided a study of the most recent state statistics available at the request of NPR and Floodlight. )
It’s confusing to divide responsibility for air pollutants, given Richmond’s many roads and railroads, as well as the refinery. The regional board that regulates air quality found that Chevron accounts for 63% of all particulate pollutants in Richmond and two nearby cities.
These problems are rarely discussed, says Ramos. He begins to cry softly when he talks about the future of the city.
“I think, at best, we’re going to be outraged, you know?” he says. Worry about the situations our network is facing. “
While Chevron owns the Standard, San Francisco-based Singer Associates runs it across the bay. The consulting firm is known for handling public relations crises. Founder Sam Singer is no stranger to Richmond; He grew up in Berkeley and worked at the Richmond Independent and a sister newspaper before moving on.
Singer Associates wrote that the media outlet came into life after Chevron developed a “fractured meeting with many stakeholders, adding municipal government leaders. “role he plays in Richmond,” according to Singer’s nomination for the industry award, cited in a staff report from the U. S. House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources.
Most of the Standard’s articles are written through Mike Aldax, an employee of Singer Associates and a former reporter for the now-defunct San Francisco Examiner and the Bay City News Service. (Aldax did not return comments on the messages. ) The site also hired two Hounds who live in Richmond to write for the site.
“Our team has worked hard to build relationships with the network, which is why other people believe in us and look to us to cover the network’s stories,” Singer wrote in an email for this story.
The rhythm of appointments comes and goes. Some of the videos featured on Standard’s homepage are several years old. The metabolism of new publications revved up in early March, shortly after NPR and Floodlight first sent a series of questions about Standard to Chevron and Singer for this story.
In launching the Standard, Chevron followed the path that the fossil fuel giant had traced thousands of miles to the south.
Since 2009, Singer has led The Amazon Post in Ecuador under the direction of Chevron. The English-language site came about as Chevron faced a long, multimillion-dollar lawsuit to hold it accountable for pollutants resulting from oil drilling in that country. Chevron had acquired Texaco in 2001, which was guilty of oil extraction. ) Chevron’s legal war has spread to other countries, including the United States and Brazil. The U. S. attorney who led the lawsuit opposed Chevron on behalf of Ecuadorian farmers and indigenous peoples, a common target of the site. He was eventually expelled from the New York bar for his moves in that case.
The Amazon Post is aimed at English-speaking people and obviously shows that it reflects “Chevron’s perspectives and reviews on the Ecuador trial. “
A later text in Spanish called Juicio Crudo (an allusion to crude oil) focuses squarely on a court ruling opposing Chevron that a U. S. court later found to be fraudulent. Reprints text directly from Chevron’s Spanish-language press releases.
In contrast, El Oriente, a Spanish-language virtual media outlet introduced in 2019, presents itself as a news story aimed at an audience living in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Until recently, it claimed on the back of its page that it “sponsored through Chevron. “A few days after NPR and Floodlight began asking questions about Chevron’s sites, the association rose to the top, just below the site’s name.
The sites are connected to each other. Chevron claims those sites are controlled and not through Singer.
In at least one case, the controversies surrounding Chevron in Ecuador or Standard in Richmond.
In 2014, then-Richmond Mayor Gayle McLaughlin visited Ecuador to see environmental degradation at a time when her party was seeking to force Chevron to pay the city more.
Shortly after returning home, the Standard’s Aldax reporter reported, “The mayor’s six-day stay in Ecuador was aimed at supporting the South American country in its ongoing war against Chevron, which he falsely accuses of polluting the rainforest. “
Aldax wrote that McLaughlin fell behind schedule by reporting $4,499 in travel expenses, which had been paid through the Ecuadorian government. The article included a video produced through The Amazon Post.
This is a rare case where Standard produced more than just risk-free network information. He was fined $200.
Today, McLaughlin considers his misstep to be minor. She tells NPR and Floodlight that she believes the story was meant to warn Chevron’s critics that it might embarrass them or just forget them altogether.
“The Richmond Standard will never publish anything that criticizes Chevron,” McLaughlin says, “and it will never publish anything that confirms the victories of the anti-Chevron community. And we want to spread the word about those victories.
Chevron unveiled its newest newsroom, Permian Proud, in the Permian Basin in August 2022.
The site publishes stories about West Texas and New Mexico. They are home to the country’s most productive oil fields, where Chevron has significant drilling interests and where local news has been hit hard. Permian Proud explained their project this way: “Our goal is to complement the vital paints of existing local media by offering hyperlocal data that you may not find anywhere else. “
Unlike California, Texas is a deeply red state that enjoys a broader base for the oil and fuel industry. Still, Chevron’s long-term in this country depends as much on the goodwill of citizens as it does on regulators.
“Over the past year and a half, Permian Proud has highlighted nominees for the national spelling bee, local arts network, nonprofits, network events, top school sports, industry achievements, and much more,” Chevron spokeswoman Catie Matthews wrote for this story. “In addition, the platform amplified local story politics through other media outlets and provided a virtual arm to some of our rural communities and smaller nonprofits that otherwise wouldn’t have one. “
Permian Proud defends Chevron’s point of view.
Most of the articles on the site are rewritten press releases. For example, the Permian Proud article “Chevron’s Permian Basin Operations to Harness More Recycled Water” is almost the same as Chevron’s press release. The original text read: “By recycling water in our hydraulic fracturing operations, we are helping to maintain new water and groundwater in drought-prone areas. “Permian Proud replaced “Chevron helps” with “we help. “
Among the few signings listed: Mike Aldax of Singer and The Richmond Standard.
In the absence of independent local news sources, Richmond citizens say they rely on others for accurate information.
Last year, a husband-and-wife team launched a small news site. A former mayor reports on local politics in a newsletter. When classes are held at the school, journalism scholars from the nearby University of California, Berkeley, cover Richmond as a component of their studies. A nonprofit held listening sessions about plans to expand a hyperlocal site in the area. And, when the news is important enough, San Francisco TV stations cross the bay to cover it.
But above all, there’s word of mouth. Activist Katt Ramos denounces the rupture of the pipeline in February 2021. As Chevron has publicly admitted, a resident infected the water long before Chevron or any other media outlet alerted the community.
“A lot of our news comes from me, picked up through other local freelancers who cover things for us,” Ramos said. “Because we have to deal with publications like The Richmond Standard that tell us the opposite of the truth. “
Felicia Álvarez, María Fernanda Bernal and Richard Tzul of the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Journalism contributed to this report.