Ruffalo and DiCaprio Host Anti-Fracking Field Trip for the One Percent, Vanity Fair Swoons
Tuesday March 1, 2016
Vanity Fair magazine has built its reputation covering celebrity culture, with recent trending articles featuring topics like Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck’s divorce and Kanye West’s debt. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, therefore, that a new article by the magazine’s Senior Hollywood writer Julie Miller – entitled “Mark Ruffalo Calls Out Governor Jerry Brown Over L.A.’s Urban Fracking” – doesn’t meet the highest standards of scientific rigor.
However, even celebrity culture magazines should scrupulously adhere to journalistic standards, meaning they should, as the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics admonishes, “take responsibility for the accuracy of their work.”
The current Vanity Fair article fawns over two Academy Award nominees (and one winner) who brought other famous actors and reporters on a tour Los Angeles’s oil fields to pontificate, on the record, about “urban fracking.” As Vanity Fair wrote:
“There are two Oscar-nominated actors this year who have worked tirelessly as environmental activists offscreen—Mark Ruffalo and Leonardo DiCaprio. And on Thursday, four days before the Academy Awards, the brothers-in-eco-arms pulled focus to L.A.’s dangerous practice of urban fracking by embarking on a ‘toxic tour’ of all of the drilling sites in Los Angeles proper.”
The excessive use of adjectives is troubling from a magazine that should strive for a minimum standard of objectivity. Our heroes work “tirelessly”! Fracking is “dangerous”!
One might suggest that the author wrote “breathlessly.”
Unfortunately, Mr. Ruffalo and Mr. DiCaprio have as much scientific credibility as the Incredible Hulk himself. The claims of these “brothers in eco-arms,” which Vanity Fair didn’t think to question, are blatantly false. (This is not the first time DiCaprio has been found to have a casual relationship with the truth this week.)
First, the headline of the article contains a factual error: there is no fracking happening in Los Angeles at all. Second, there is an overwhelming scientific consensus that f...