This Space For Sale?
Chesapeake Mouthpiece Has Low Regard For Media
Last updated Saturday, August 9, 2008 5:16 PM CDT in Columns
By John Brummett
THE MORNING NEWS
Either Julie Wilson is an idiot or I'm a prostitute.
Wilson is vice president for corporate development at a Fort Worth-based division of Chesapeake Energy. That's a right-wing outfit with headquarters in Oklahoma City whose chief executive officer, Aubrey McClendon, was a big financial backer of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in their sliming of John Kerry's war record.
Chesapeake is the biggest player in the Fayetteville Shale gas exploration frenzy in north-central Arkansas.
For my part, I'm either a professional independent journalist or, to hear this Julie Wilson tell it, a paid-for pawn of corporate advertisers in newspapers publishing this column.
Today's story begins with the fact that Chesapeake also is digging up the Fort Worth area in what's called the Barnett Shale play. It turns out that those wells are getting closer to residential areas than ours. Naturally, there's more detraction down there about the whole thing.
It also turns out that Chesapeake has hired former local broadcast journalists in the Dallas-Fort Worth market to produce and perform promotional television advertising - infomercials, as they're hideously called, and even a forthcoming regular talk show - for the Barnett Shale play. These extended-length spots are made to look like news reports or short documentaries, in hopes people won't know the difference.
Here in Arkansas we've seen our own local adaptation of this extended infomercial by Chesapeake. It features Anne Jansen, who, for many years, read teleprompters for evening news programs on a Little Rock station.
Jansen recently retired so that she could spend more time with advertisers - er, I mean family.
Anyway, National Public Radio did a report on all these goings-on in the Barnett Shale play around Fort Worth, since nobody much cares about anything going on in rural north-central Arkansas. The report quoted unhappy residents. Then it delved into these expensive television infomercials, the ones talking about how much money is being generated and how trees can grow back.
Then it quoted the aforementioned Julie Wilson on the thinking behind hiring former local journalists for these infomercials.
She said: "Well, I think we pay those journalists - whether on Channel 8 or Channel 11 or the Star-Telegram - in terms of advertising support. We see this as pretty much, instead of running ads on the program, we're just writing the check direct."
Wilson seems to be saying that the corporation purchases media advertising not only to avail itself of the established viewership or readership of the media outlet for purposes of enhancing the corporate brand. She is saying Chesapeake buys conventional media advertising to buy the financial dependence and alliance of the news reporters - the supposed objective journalists - whose salaries come in large part from dollars generated by advertising.
We're paying for you clowns either way, she's effectively announcing.
From Wilson's corporate corner, hiring journalists directly to say fake, newsy-sounding things in a fake, newsy-looking format is the same as buying newspaper and television advertising in the conventional way. She is saying Chesapeake is simply eliminating the middle man. She is saying Chesapeake is merely ending the charade.
I don't know whether Chesapeake buys advertising in newspapers that publish this column. If Chesapeake does, I missed the memo about how they've bought me.
I do recall that one of these big gas drillers sent a big gift basket of treats to the office last Christmas. Not to be holier than thou, but I didn't partake and I tsk-tsked some who did.
I'm delighted to say that this little spirit of the season didn't even cross my mind when, last week, I ridiculed the Game & Fish Commission's sellout to Chesapeake of our public wildlife preserves.
All I know to do on this column is hit the send button and wait to see if everybody, or anybody, publishes it.
John Brummett is a columnist for The Morning News in Little Rock.
About this columnist
John Brummett has been writing about Arkansas and national politics for three decades and as a regular columnist since 1986. Email Brummett at jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.
Click here to read his blog.
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