I'm Amy Westertel and this is Drilt.

Today we're going to be talking about the relationship between the fossil fuel industry and the media.

That relationship often starts with a giant contract with a PR firm.

We're talking in the order of $50 million a year, $30 million a year, $25 million a year,

these are not small contracts.

And what these firms do for that money is not just provide the sort of standard things we think of

with PR, like placing advertising, maybe trying to arrange interviews for executives, things like that,

sending out press releases. They also do public affairs for these companies.

And that means doing things like setting up front groups for them,

coordinating with trade industry groups around messaging, coordinating with think tanks.

Sometimes it's setting up a whole fake blog universe.

In a lot of ways PR firms have been sort of the linchpin of the fossil fuel industry's plan for a long,

long time. And the media has been complicit. We're going to get into all of that a lot more up ahead.

The most interesting thing is the scale of the money. You know, you're talking about hundreds of

millions of dollars spent by these trade associations to try to influence public policy.

They're not selling a product separately. There's tens of millions more spent by the oil companies

to sell their gasoline to us and sell their image. But this is broader. If you look at spending

by the American Council for Clean Coal Electricity or by American Petroleum Institute,

it's a bigger campaign of some sort that's been agreed upon by the members of that trade

association as a need. So it's a window into their their political game.

You might remember that voice from the first season of Drilled. That's Kurt Davies from the

Climate Investigation Center. Kurt and his team have been busy surveying PR firms and studying

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