The Oilver Stone of oil

That would be Howell Raines, former executive editor of the NYT, current media columnist for Portfolio, and a knuckleheaded conspiracy theorist. Raines claims that Exxon Mobil and the others can move prices at the snap of a finger, and that today's business journalists are perfectly content to feed on whatever the oil flaks dish out. He cites the highly skewed views of investigative reporters Don Bartlett and Jim Steele:

Steele makes the point that the newsrooms that were once staffed by the redistributionist children of the New Deal and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. are now populated with the children of Reaganomics: “Younger reporters come out of a mind-set that the market rules, taxes are evil, and government ought to let these people in the oil industry go about their business.” 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.

What are these guys smoking? Yeah, I suppose the reporters who helped expose Enron some years back were on loan from the Teamsters. Again citing Bartlett and Steele, Raines argues that oil companies want to spend the least amount possible for refineries, synthetic fuels and oil exploration. Here is his eye-popping first paragraph: "The cover of a recent BusinessWeek about the runup in oil and gasoline prices framed the question of what’s causing it nicely: 'Speculation or Manipulation?' But the story was maddeningly evenhanded." Guess we can't have any of that evenhanded stuff. NYT columnist Joe Nocera, one of the more evenhanded business writers around, puts in his two cents:

He seems to believe that the big problem in the United States is that the oil companies are not exploring enough “on the vast, unused acreage in existing oil leases.” Apparently he hasn’t been to Fort Worth recently, where companies are drilling for natural gas in people’s backyards — literally. He sloughs off the tens of billions Big Oil spends each year exploring for oil — and doesn’t even seem to realize that the $25 billion Exxon Mobil paid last year “to foreign governments” is money that makes such exploration possible. He flicks aside the notion that the oil companies want to build more refineries — ignoring the fact that the lack of new refinery capacity is a huge bottleneck that helps push up prices. He mocks “network TV anchors and correspondents” for portraying big oil companies as “powerless victims” to supply and demand. Never mind that Exxon Mobil, for instance, controls less than 2 percent of the world’s oil supply. Most of the world’s oil is controlled by countries, not companies.