Journalism Failures: Philip Bump Edition

The 2016 campaign has exposed a lot of inferiorities that altogether have seemingly grand impacts on U.S. society. One of the most revealing aspects in the presidential race is the value and influence of the press, and how lackadaisical or discreditable this pillar of a full functioning society has become. Washington Post’s Philip Bump’s recent analysis of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and fossil fuel contributions is a prime example.

Recently, an exchange between Clinton and a Greenpeace activist with a request to pledge not to take money from those connected to the fossil fuel industry went viral. Instead of simply accepting or denying the pledge, Clinton deflected the question to attack the Bernie Sanders camp for also expressing discontent at accepting donations from players in the industry.

Forget that Greenpeace asked the question, not anyone from the Sanders campaign. Forget that Greenpeace hasn’t endorsed a candidate as they are more focused on holding candidates accountable in regards to fossil fuels, and also forget the fact that Greenpeace has conducted its own research into contributions from big oil. Seriously forget about Greenpeace because that’s what Bump and the rest of the mainstream news media have done.

Bump figured that the best route of parsing this information wasn’t to contact Greenpeace and question their research findings and tactics, but rather to conduct his own research. What did he find? Clinton has raised $308,000 ($309,107 by Greenpeace research) from employees of oil and gas industry, while Sanders had received $54,000. Well that number is certainly small and should be of no particular concern to Greenpeace or any environmental activist, and it sure makes Sanders sound hypocritical. What would we do without you Bump!

Except Bump has either omitted or failed to include the amount of money raised for the Clinton campaign by lobbyists currently registered with the fossil fuel industry, which totals at $1,465,610. This includes contributions directly from lobbyists as well as bundled contributions. There’s also the $3,250,000 Greenpeace found contributed to Priorities Action USA, a Super PAC that supports Clinton. At $4.5 million, that is fourteen times higher than what Bump calculated.

Bump includes $860,000 donated by lobbyists, but as a whole not separated by the industries they work for. He also does not include the amount they bundled, only the fact that bundling is a part of election campaigns.

Apparently Bump didn’t think this was important enough to include in his article. Why? Is it because he completely forgot what the whole exchange was about, a pledge not to take any funds from the fossil fuel industry, including lobbyists that are directly connected to these companies? Or is to reframe the issue in order to cast Clinton in a better light? Probably a mix of both.

Rather than acting like a journalist and asking what Eva Resnick-Day, the Greenpeace activist, hoped to achieve through this confrontation (like real journalist Amy Goodman did or could be easily found here) Bump chose to speculate. He attempts to “unpack the question” but instead assumes that Resnick-Day and Greenpeace only cared about the donations because of the potential influence it could have on Clinton’s campaign and potential presidency. This is true but only partially, as Greenpeace and other environmental activists are extremely scrupulous when it comes to the fossil fuel industry, and any cash from lobbyists with traces of oil or gas should be rejected.

Well perhaps not all environmental groups, as Bump reached out to a different nonprofit, 350 Action. An outfit he describes as “prominent” and one that seems more readily available to support his view that bundled money from the fossil fuel industry isn’t bad. That isn’t to say 350 Action haven’t been aware of Clinton’s contributions, as the group’s spokesperson Jason Kowalski iterated after the Iowa caucus that while Clinton has become “more progressive” on fighting climate change, “climate activists remain concerned that many of her largest bundlers have ties to Big Oil.” But yet Bump believes Clinton is “justified” in being annoyed that activists have concerns.

Part of the problem with Blow and the rest of the Post is that they have accepted lobbyists as part of the Washington establishment, that they deserve as little scrutiny as a politician that accepts bribes donations from them. They believe that lobbyists “are a much stronger representative of the way money influences politics than are campaign contributions” and they are just doing their job of building “relationships with elected officials that can then be leveraged…to influence policy.” Since it’s not directly quid pro quo, just slightly “ugly and frequently questionable” tactics then there is no foul.

Bump is so comprised in his own dogma that he says Greenpeace’s “understanding of money” is simplistic but surmises that an examination of fundraising from lobbyists would be “much harder to brush off” for Clinton. Maybe if he read Greenpeace’s report instead of attempting and failing to complete his own research, he would see the light being directly focused on lobbyists. He’s too busy eschewing the issue at hand just like Clinton had in the first place.