If you ask Howell Raines, the last time this country saw any decent reporting about the energy industry was in 2003, when Don Barlett and Jim Steele shined a light on Big Oil's back room dealings and the government's complicit role in it for Time. They won two two Pulitzers and two National Magazine Awards for their work. Outside of their reporting, however, all we're ever treated to is the typical "Gas is expensive!" headline, which is sometimes rewritten as "Pain at the pump," "Consumers cut back on holiday travel," and, "Tax rebate cheques go toward filling up the tank."

Blame general assignment reporters and their editors, says Raines, who all too easily go after the "consumer suffering" angle of the story — and not how companies like Chevron, ExxonMobile, and BP are raking in glorious profits while doing little to nothing to actually reduce oil dependency, find alternative energy sources, or exert any energy to driving down gas prices to below $4 a gallon.

As journalism has passed from a hungry to an elite profession, there’s no shock value in the fact that Exxon Mobil paid only $5 billion in U.S. income taxes last year while it paid $25 billion to foreign governments. Even with Exxon Mobil making $76,000 a minute, the last thing that occurs to many assignment editors and reporters is to investigate whether a windfall-profits tax would drive Exxon Mobil, BP, and other oil companies to invest in the alternative-energy strategies they boast about in their television commercials.

Then there’s the problem of letting general-assignment reporters, rather than energy specialists, cover gasoline prices mainly as a story of consumer suffering. About 40 percent of U.S. oil is produced domestically, and Washington has declined to regulate auto fuel as an essential commodity. That’s where the vertical integration of a giant like Exxon Mobil creates market leverage. It owns oil fields, processing plants, and retail outlets, creating some monopoly-like advantages in controlling supply and fixing prices in the U.S. market. Then there is the remarkable job that the oil companies have done in persuading network-TV anchors and correspondents to depict them as they want to be seen: powerless victims of a supply-and-demand cycle that is as immutable as gravity and as random as lightning. Congress, responding to demands for tougher laws on oil speculation, would prefer to blame environmental regulations. Much of the context-free reporting about what the executives say, in Congress and on television, is marked by breathtaking gullibility.

And then, when we get the very oil industry execs in front of a camera so we might have a chance to hold them to the coals … nothing.

Speaking of television, no one of any age can doubt that the industry’s star performer in the public relations battle over gasoline prices is Rex Tillerson, chairman and C.E.O. of Exxon Mobil. His appearances on the Today show have become five-minute promos for price escalation, with Matt Lauer cast as the surrogate for a nation of consumers who don’t fully understand their role—helpless and sacrificial—while the company maximizes shareholder value, “our reason for being.”

This is a “demand-driven price runup, no question about it,” Tillerson drawls, fingers intertwined and as fidget-free as Chance the Gardener. Lauer gamely zeroes in on Exxon Mobil’s dirty secret—that it spends only 5.3 percent of revenue on exploration at a time of record revenue. “If you’re making $400 billion a year, should consumers expect you to pay or spend even more on exploration?” Lauer asks.

The unflappable Tillerson describes this modest expenditure as “very, very robust.” He adds, with apparent conviction, “We would do more if we could gain access to more areas.” In other words, give us ANWR, then we can talk price at the pump. In fact, no unbiased expert claims that exploiting the fields in the Alaskan wilderness would cause more than a bump in world supply or prices in the U.S.  By the way, Tillerson observes, the industry needs more refineries too.

Lauer, charmingly outpointed at every turn, finally blurts, “Mr. Tillerson, you’re always nice with your time.”

“My pleasure, Matt,” the oil king rumbles, not a hair out of place on his salt-and-pepper corporate coif.
And it was, no doubt, a pleasure for him to slip out of Rockefeller Center, built with Standard Oil dollars accrued in an earlier era of rapacious pricing, without addressing the oil-company claims that are most easily disproved by that old-fashioned journalistic method called reporting.

[Portfolio]