Today is the three year anniversary of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill and manslaughter disaster. 11 men were killed and more than 200 million gallons of crude spilled into the Gulf in what would turn out to be the largest accidental oil spill in world history.
A remark on last week’s Real Time with Bill Maher drew my attention back to the woeful “advocacy journalism” (I’m being kind there) of those on the Right who continue, even to this day, to perform public relations work for the fossil fuel industry under the guise of “journalism”.
Maher cited an embarrassing quote from an article by Steven F. Hayward, published by the unapologetically-wrong-on-just-about-everything Weekly Standard (the “brain”-child of its also-unapologetically-wrong-on-just-about-everything editors William Kristol and Fred Barnes) which, for non-RW loon reporters, might have been a career-ender. Or, at least, for non-RW loon reporters, it might have led to the humblest of apologies and acknowledgment for having been so tragically wrong. No such apologies or contrition occur in RW Media “Expert” Land, unfortunately, where there is no inaccuracy too wrong and no prognostication so off base that it might cause shame or humility or, gasp, an invitation from its publishers to never write there again.
Just days before the explosion of BP’s rig and the death of those workers (BP recently pleaded guilty to 11 counts of manslaughter, after which nobody from BP went to jail, naturally), Hayward wrote: “Few areas of national policy offer as bad a ratio of blather to substance as energy. It is a field where cliché, wishful thinking, and wince-inducing ignorance dominate the discourse.”
“No matter how patiently or repeatedly the myths and realities of energy are explained,” Hayward condescended, “we are nowhere near being able to replace God’s gift of dirty, toxic fossil fuels with clean, renewable energy. “Liberals,” he noted, “are the worst offenders,” when it comes to this naive, misinformed wishful thinking.
Hayward, the sage and much-smarter-than-you Fellow from the American Enterprise Institute, went on to write in his article, published on April 16, 2010 [emphasis added]…
Just four days later, on April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf.
That’s not all he was wrong about, of course. The same article article also offered the wisdom — just two years prior to the hottest year in recorded history in the contiguous U.S. and the ninth hottest year on record globally — that “the case for catastrophic global warming” was “in free fall”…
While actual journalists might have been embarrassed and humiliated and even apologized profusely for the embarrassing statements in that article, Hayward, being a RW “journalist”, went on to follow up the article in a subsequent Weekly Standard piece just two months later (while millions of gallons of crude were still gushing uncontrollably into the Gulf), headlined “How to Think About Oil Spills: The perils of overreaction”, wherein he began by acknowledging his previous sniff at those who “fear oil spills from offshore rights today” with a pretend “big mea culpa”, only to go on to argue that “The basic point was nonetheless correct.”
Hayward, of course, was not alone in his misleading commentary prior to BP’s disaster, as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting pointed out in the month that followed the spill. And it wasn’t only Rightwingers in the media who were exposed as clowns. Even President Barack Obama, on April 2, 2010, just over two weeks prior to the spill, declared “oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills.”
Obama, of course, was generally right, as was Hayward’s “basic point.” While those rigs and the wells they drill leak all the time, they don’t generally cause spills of the likes the Deepwater Horizon disaster. On the other hand, when they do, it is catastrophic. And it only takes one such spill to bear that out. And when they don’t, they are still producing a toxic product that continues to poison the planet in dangerously irreversible ways.
Despite his own proud, if “wince-inducing ignorance”, the unapologetic Steven F. Hayward continues to pen more fossil fuel industry propaganda, more discredited cover stories, and even another denier article titled “The Climate Circus Leaves Town” in the magazine’s latest issue, on the third anniversary of his most infamous “wince-inducing ignorance.”
For The Weekly Standard, and other similar Rightwing PR outlets, apparently, there remain no such “standards” at all.
I think you meant barrels, not gallons were spilled, no?
Brad,
The odd thing about this is that four years ago, one of the best
pieces about the waywardness of modern-day conservative punditry was written by…Steven Hayward:
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2009-10-04/opinions/36850417_1_conservative-books-william-f-buckley-intellectuals
I interviewed Hayward on my old radio show in 2009 about
his book on the Reagan years and the right’s problems since:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/drtucker/2009/11/12/steven-hayward-on-the-age-of-reagan
The thing I don’t get about Hayward is that he has often argued that conservatives need to take environmental issues
seriously, while at the same time insulting progressives who take environmental issues seriously (see his “Green Weenie” pieces on Power Line). If conservatives are to take environmental issues seriously, they will have to show respect for the progressives who do the same, no?
D.R. –
I would, of course, ultimately defer to your expertise in matters of “conservative” intellectual honesty or dishonesty. I haven’t gotten to listen to your interview with Hayward yet, but based on the WaPo article you cite, I’d say there are a number of insights there that you, understandably, may have missed, or willfully overlooked, when reading it the first time around.
For a start, it appears that he, like you (probably around the same time) and so many other previously legitimate conservatives, was going through a bit of hand-wringing and navel-gazing in the 2009, early post-Dubya era when virtually all of the long-extolled elements of modern conservatism had been both implemented and proven to have failed in dramatically spectacular ways.
At that point, it seems, there were two choices: 1) The road you took, coming to the realization of the con/failure and choosing to expose and shed light on it. 2) The road Hayward seems to have taken, digging in one’s heels, biting the bullet and becoming what he had once (at least pretended) to abhor. One simply cannot be serious about the type of arguments you must have read in to his WaPo piece and then go to work for the execrable and self-discrediting PowerLine blog, as Hayward ultimately did.
But there were many hints in that WaPo piece of his you link to (one that I hadn’t read previously). At the time, I suspect they were easy to overlook. For example, he wrote about Buckley’s lack of sinking to the type of angry, intellectually dishonest wingnuttery we see from his party and movement now, thusly:
Clearly, that was just before, or just at the time, that Hayward was realizing that that’s what his party and/or discredited movement had become. He would either need to join the equivalent of today’s talk radio/cable news show in 6-minute segments (that would be an angry, non-credible disinformation site like PowerLine) or become a lost, irrelevant remnant of history.
He continued offering hints of same in the graf that followed it:
Mind you, what had become of the “conservative movement” was not discredited in his mind, as it would have been, by then, to any intellectually honest observer, but simply “thrown off balance”. The cause: those darn populists! And because both Kristol and Coulter both start with the same consonant sound, the clown Kristol (who offered the “populism” of Sarah Palin as a way to same the movement in 2008) gets to fall on the not-discredited side of that argument. Imagine that! (Hayward knows well on which side his bread is buttered, it seems, as Kristol, of course, is the editor of the Weekly Standard which continues to offer Hayward a healthy amount of wingnut welfare in exchange for long, wrong, pre-discredited cover stories which offer “intellectual” insights like the case for Global Warming “is flat-lining” and “ClimateGate” email proves it was a hoax. Oh, and Al Gore is fat.)
But did Hayward offer any true intellectual honesty at all, even in that 2009 WaPo piece? He offers this whopper that suggests otherwise: “President Obama has done conservatives a great favor, delivering CPR to the movement with his program of government gigantism”.
Seriously, dude? “His program of government gigantism”? That was not an intellectually honest man, even back then when he was appearing to exhibit oh, so honest introspection on what had become of his beloved party and movement.
Need more evidence? He characterized the “‘tea party’ phenomenon” as “authentic” in the very same piece. Really? Do you believe anyone with a straight face could characterize the Fox-created, GOP/Koch-funded Tea Party as “authentic” even back then??
Finally, he knew what was going on. He wrote: “The brain waves of the American right continue to be erratic, when they are not flat-lining” and then wrote “There are still conservative intellectuals attempting to produce important work, but some publishers have been cutting back on serious conservative titles because they don’t sell.”
Indeed, his type of “conservatism” no longer sells, and he knows it. His only audience is now a flat-lining American right. What better way to serve that very audience than by tossing out discredited nonsense and red-meat in exchange for Kristol dollars at Weekly Standard (and, likely, some form of tip from the fossil fuel industry, I’d imagine) and in the pages of today’s equivalent of Right-wing loon radio: the PowerLine blog. Next stop for Hayward: Breitbart.com, if The Blaze doesn’t scoop him up first.
He and you both faced a similar crises of conscience, it seems, right around the same time. You took the honest way out in exchange for little more than a good night’s sleep and the ability to look in the mirror. He decided to dig in in his heels and keep the filthy dirty pipeline of wingnut welfare flowing.
Brad,
Good point, and thanks for pointing out the flaws I overlooked at the time. I went back and listened to my interview and, well, let’s just say it doesn’t hold up after 3 1/2 years. 😉
With regard to your point: “Indeed, his type of ‘conservatism’ no longer sells, and he knows it. His only audience is now a flat-lining American right. What better way to serve that very audience than by tossing out discredited nonsense and red-meat in exchange for Kristol dollars at Weekly Standard (and, likely, some form of tip from the fossil fuel industry, I’d imagine) and in the pages of today’s equivalent of Right-wing loon radio: the PowerLine blog. Next stop for Hayward: Breitbart.com, if The Blaze doesn’t scoop him up first.” Sadly, I think the entire conservative punditocracy, with rare exceptions (i.e., every one who has been branded a “RINO” by the right wing), made the collective decision to pander to the lowest common denominator, which is why I now go out of my way to avoid most conservative commentary. The quality just isn’t there anymore.
I certainly can’t gainsay the value of “a good night’s sleep and the ability to look in the mirror.” It felt great to regain that ability!
Happy Earth Day to all Brad Blog bloggers.
Great exposé Brad!
Steven F. Hayward is of Oil-Qaeda, the number one terrorist group on Earth.