Chevron has tried to silence me in
retaliation for my human rights work. Please
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ignored by the corporate media.
In honor of our nation’s anniversary, I want to call you attention to something positive — how the media, even in the corporate context, can at times actually help advance the ball in holding the power structure accountable.
I direct your attention to a 60 Minutes segment on Chevron’s environmental destruction in Ecuador’s Amazon. The segment aired on the network in 2009 at the height of our legal battle with the company that years later led to my 993-day detention.
Please watch this and let me know what you think. It includes an interview with me and a Chevron lawyer, Sylvia Garrigo.
The segment was reported by Scott Pelley and produced by Draggan Mihailovich. Both recently were fired in the right-wing putsch led by billionaire Larry Ellison and his new editor, Bari Weiss. In a staff meeting, Pelley had accused Weiss of “murdering” 60 Minutes by repeatedly interfering with editorial decisions to ensure they have a pro-Trump slant.
This segment is an example of the kind of robust and balanced reporting that Weiss and her allies in the Trump universe are trying to kill by taking control of CBS and possibly CNN and HBO, if Ellison succeeds in purchasing Warner Brothers Discovery.
I had ample contact with both Pelley and Mihailovich in the lead-up to the 2009 story on Chevron. I found both to be objective and professional, despite massive and inappropriate pressure applied by Chevron to the network to kill the story.
I heard at the time from a source inside CBS that Chevron’s top brass was so nervous that they contacted the then-CEO of the network, Les Moonves, to try to get him to spike the Ecuador story from the executive suite. Unlike Ellison and Weiss, Moonves actually respected the independence of the show and refused the request.
In a state of apparent desperation, Chevron’s team then hired former CNN reporter Gene Randall to produce a pro-Chevron segment on the same topic, which the company posted online a few days before the 60 Minutes segment aired. It received almost no attention and actually backfired against the company.
In the meantime, 7 million people watched the initial airing of the 60 Minutes segment posted here. The segment also won several awards.
After the segment aired, the company’s Board of Directors was furious that company management had let the Ecuador legal case get so out of control that it would be covered on a national broadcast. That’s when Chevron shifted gears and ordered its legal team to attack me personally, ultimately locking me up in 2019 in the nation’s first corporate prosecution. In the meantime, Chevron has not spent the first dollar to remediate its pollution disaster in Ecuador, despite multiple court orders that it do so.
Please share this 60 Minutes segment with others as a testament to the truth about what Chevron did in Ecuador, and as a testament the type of reporting that today is sorely missing from most major news networks.
—Steven
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