Amy Westervelt Of Drilled Podcast Wins Covering Climate Now Award

 Last week, NBC's Al Roker and Savannah Sellers presented independent journalist Amy Westervelt with Covering Climate Now's Audio/Radio award for the Mad Men season of her climate change podcast Drilled, which focused on the 100-year history of fossil fuel propaganda in the United States. 

See the full list of winners at The Guardian. 

The award comes as Amy Westervelt is preparing to launch the next phase of that research, her new project Rigged, a massive multi-platform archive on the history of disinformation, going live October 26 (just ahead of the scheduled disinformation hearings in Congress later that week). 

 

Amy explains the project's genesis:
"I started Rigged because I realized I had hundreds of documents on my desk that weren't doing any good there, and that could be useful to other reporters working on stories about disinformation, ranging from climate denial and Covid hoaxers to the Big Lie around the election.

"There's a general sense out there that disinformation is a relatively new thing, and I think it's important for people to understand that it's more than a century old, that Americans--not Russians--invented the techniques we're still seeing today, and that it was created largely to help American industry circumvent democracy when it needed to."

Drilled is part of a podcast network run by Critical Frequency, which is a women-run podcast network founded by journalists and focused on the backstory of the biggest issues facing society today, climate change and justice. 

 

Critical Frequency shows are billed as answering the questions: how did we get here? And how are we going to get out?

Named AdWeek's 2019 Podcast Network of the Year, Critical Frequency was founded in 2017 and has produced a total of 24 shows, including forthcoming co-productions with Stitcher's Witness Docs and Crooked Media. 

 Drilled was also one of the first climate podcasts, started independently at a time when host Amy Westervelt was told again and again there was no audience for such a thing. Turns out, there was, and Drilled has remained at the forefront of the climate-pod movement as it has exploded in the last couple of years. 

 Sure, there are numerous podcasts about climate change. But it's an expansive topic that offers podcasts a wide berth to follow a multitude of eddies and currents that run through the climate change discussion.

Drilled does not play the role of climate change proselytizer. Instead, the podcast takes a "boots on the ground" view of climate upheavals through personal stories and the consequences of "ostrich in the sand" denial.

Westervelt brings sonic excellence to the podcast and deftly foreshadows the sense of future danger without dismal doomsday warnings.

You can listen to earlier seasons of Drilled here and below is a summary of the previous five seasons. Drilled in its sixth season.

 

 Season 1 traced the corporate-funded creation and spread of climate denial, including interviews with former Exxon scientists, primary source documents, and an in-depth look at the history of fossil fuel-funded influence campaigns.

 Season 2 : Hot Water follows a group of West Coast crab fisherman who are experiencing first-hand the devastating impacts of climate change. And this unlikely group of climate activists just became the first industry to sue big oil.    

Season 3 : The Mad Men of Climate Denial digs into the history of fossil fuel propaganda and the few "Mad Men of climate denial" who shaped it.  

Season 4 : There Will Be Fraud follows the fossil fuel industry's efforts to use the COVID-19 pandemic to push through its wishlist of deregulation and subsidies. 

 Season 5 : La Lucha En La Jungla   looks at the decades long battle between indigenous groups in the Ecuadorian Amazon and Chevron.