Climate Action and Native Advertising: How Fossil Fuel Companies Present Environmental Commitment in American and British News Media

Confronting severe economic challenges in the twenty-first century, many news media are forging new relationships with advertisers, including the focus of this study: native advertising. At the same time, as the climate crisis worsens, and political pressures and news coverage increase, we are seeing the fossil fuel industry expand and shift its communication about the topic. This study sits at the intersection of these trends: we ask to what extent, and how, native advertisements are being employed in fossil fuel communication campaigns. We analyze 252 native ads sponsored by fossil fuel companies between 2014 and 2022 in leading English-language news outlets. Led by human quantitative content analysis, with supplementary automated text analysis, we show that the style of climate science denial documented by, for example, Oreskes and Conway, is absent from native ad communications; in its place are frequent mentions of the environment, the reality of climate change, and the need to decarbonize. In fact, the primary position of fossil fuel companies in our data is the assertion that they are leading the decarbonization of energy systems. To do so, they strongly emphasize the relative virtues of natural gas and promote investments in unproven new technologies. A secondary tactic emphasizes the importance of energy to development and quality of life. Our discussion explores the challenges of analyzing claims that are often superficially true but misleading in context and the questions misleading native advertising raises for news media in a challenging digital media landscape.