“If it’s not true, don’t say it. If it’s not right, don’t do it.” — Marcus Aurelius

Intestinal Fortitude and Courage: Hard to Come by yet essential.

2018 was a very good year for climate activists.  For those of us who were trying to be heard for decades, it took the warnings of a fifteen year old Swedish girl at COP 24 in Katowice, Poland to sound the global alarm.  She was saying what many of us have always known to be true.    Humanity can not continue with the same thinking that created our on going crisis.

On that December day in 2018, media outlets worldwide picked up on what she said. She was the top news story for many media outlets.  Many of those media outlets continued taking the corporate sponsorship and advertising from the same corporations  who continue to plunder our planet with their ways of doing business.

But there are many of us who believe that truth is not a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder.

Right now, in every part of our world, we battle a constant crisis of misinformation, of coverups that go unreported,  of verified information distorted by special interest groups and amplified by media organizations both large and small, and then amplified by people through social media.

As our world continues to evolve at lightning speeds, we find it essential for the truth to outshine all those who oppose it, and, no matter how painful the truth may or may not be, it is absolutely essential that truth is amplified.

But what happens when ones moral compass opposes the direction their employer goes?  As journalists, we have a responsibility to speak truth to power, and to inspire and empower the communities we serve.  And in some cases, to engage people with facts, not fiction with easy-to-understand terms—in a way that they will understand.

Mobilized recently caught up with DeSmog’s Matthew Green, who took a stand against the company which employed him, (Reuters,) realizing he could no longer accept the greenwashing of climate change by the sponsoring corporations( Saudi Aramco for example) that used a well-thought of media network to distort the truth at the cost of public health.

A conversation with Matthew Green of DeSmog

Matthew is a husband, father, journalist and student of trauma healing. He began his journey as a reporter in conflict zones, and is the author of two books: on warlord Joseph Kony, and on the trauma journeys of British soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Two years ago, he left a global news organisation to join DeSmog, a nonprofit dedicated to exposing climate corruption.

Building on years of exploring spiritual and healing modalities, he’s immersed in studying the psychological and mystical principles of integrating individual, ancestral and collective trauma with the international facilitator Thomas Hübl. Matthew writes the Resonant World newsletter serving the collective trauma healing movement, and recently launched Toxic Workplace Survival Guy to provide practical guidance to people in dysfunctional work environments.

What were you doing at Reuters in the early stages of your career?

I was fortunate to land a job straight out of university as a graduate trainee at Reuters. Back then, they had a prestigious training scheme for young journalists. I spent a year in London going through the training and then was deployed to Paris for a year and a half. From there, I was sent to East Africa, based in the Nairobi Bureau, covering 15 countries in East Africa. I had assignments in other parts of Africa and was embedded with US Marines during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and I returned to Baghdad for Reuters the following year.

I had quite an exciting and rewarding career as a correspondent before I left the company. I worked for The Financial Times for several years, came back to the UK, wrote a book, and then rejoined the company in 2018-2019 to cover climate change.

Regarding your time embedded with troops in Iraq, what does that entail?

Before the invasion of Iraq, the US military invited large numbers of journalists to hitch a ride with them as part of the invading force. I think there were over a hundred embedded journalists, integrated with the troops.

I was with a battalion of US Marines, traveling from Kuwait to Baghdad over a few weeks. I was there when the statues of Saddam Hussein’s began to fall and stayed for a few weeks after that. Being so close to the US military opened a window into America that not too many outsiders get to look through, a different perspective on America. I learned more about the US than about Iraq due to limited interaction with Iraqis and more with young men in the Marines.

Was this separation from Iraqis by design?

Well, if we look at the bigger picture, Yes, the Pentagon had a well-thought- through media strategy. Their approach is that they wanted to control the message, so they preferred journalists to be embedded rather than roaming independently.

They made it clear that they would not guarantee the safety of anyone not embedded. Some journalists were killed independently, while others were killed even while embedded. Those killed while working independently included several colleagues killed and injured when a US tank opened fire on a hotel in Baghdad.  I was on the outskirts at that time. I mean clearly the Pentagon had made the calculation that they would get more favorable coverage if we were given access and I think it probably worked out pretty well for them

Some of the Stories that DeSmog uncovered:

• Reuters, New York Times Top List of Fossil Fuel Industry’s Media Enablers
• Reuters Plus: Greenwashing for Saudi Aramco
• Financial Times, Reuters Pull Saudi Aramco-sponsored Climate Content

Did you have restrictions on what you could report?

In some respects, we had an enormous amount  of freedom within the units that we were embedded with.

We could wander around. There was no escort. Nobody was really keeping an eye on us;  they were too busy getting on with their jobs in the context of an invasion. I was riding along for a week or so in an ammunition truck between two young guys, a young US Marine, the driver, and the co-driver,  just shooting the breeze basically when we weren’t being ambushed or watching firefights taking place.

I then moved into an armored personnel carrier and again got to know some of the Marines who were the crew of that vehicle, and in that context,  our perception of the war was very much the perspective of the invasion force. I mean we had very little opportunity to speak to any Iraqis in the path of this Invasion. Perhaps the most vivid memory I have is when we were rolling into Baghdad and people were actually coming out and serving tea and handing the Invaders flowers.

So there was spontaneous support, because obviously the regime of Saddam Hussein was widely opposed in Iraq. But of course we know that that honeymoon did not last very long and due to many of the terrible mistakes that were made by the US  Administration , things obviously deteriorated very rapidly. But I didn’t cover so much of the Insurgency that erupted but I  do have very vivid memories of the invasion.

I believe that the job of a journalist is to report the truth–not opinion–but facts, no matter how gory or scary or how beautiful the stories are.  But many people don’t want to hear or be bothered with the truth.  They want to live drama-free lives while ignoring anything that makes them feel uncomfortable.  There must have been a time in your life, quite possibly in your childhood where the Journalism “bug” was planted and hooked you..

Well there’s several levels to the answer of that question and appreciate you asking it.

At the simplest level I can remember as a  teenager actually listening to coverage by the BBC of the first Gulf War in 1990, which was obviously where George W.Bush stopped short of toppling Saddam Hussein but certainly pushed Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.  And there’s not really any other way to describe it beyond that. I just found the idea of being a journalist in such a situation incredibly exciting. It seemed like a job where one would be effectively paid to go and have an adventure on behalf of the listeners or viewers back home and I became very fixated on that career.

I really worked very hard and was very focused on becoming a correspondent and I did. And as I’ve just said, there was a  level at which it was just a pure search for adventure, and I think looking back perhaps with the benefit of some greater maturity,  I think there was an element of seeking initiation, almost like some young men join the Army or the military.  I wasn’t going to join the military but there was something about the idea of covering war that seemed that it would transform me into somebody different and perhaps more than who I was before.  Now I don’t subscribe to that notion now but I think that perhaps unconsciously that was part of the motivation, and as I’ve done more work on collective and inter-generational trauma; I’ve also uncovered patterns in my own ancestry, and my own extended family, around war- the first World War and the Second World War–and I see a continuity in my desire to be exposed to war with with some of those patterns that have been at work in my family over generations. But at the time, I wasn’t aware of any of that. It’s only much later that I I saw my early youthful enthusiasm to be in a war zone in a more expanded light.

So for many of us, we find ourselves working in the fields of our passions and eventually discover that   it’s not thought it would be. It kind of takes us out of the illusion and into reality.    And for those who want to become good journalists, they realize that the media operation has nothing to do with telling the truth–whether it’s a newspaper, television, radio, web-based—-it’s all about the advertising dollars which dictate a good portion of the editorial copy.

But times like these, where status quo systems are pushing us off a cliff, we cannot sit on the sidelines.  For our own survival, with the natural world threatened– something happened that changed  your trajectory forever. What happened in your words? 

It was a  very formative experience and not one that I would ever have anticipated would happen to me. I rejoined Reuters  in 2018 to work  on a special project on the impact of climate change on the oceans and ocean temperatures and how that in turn affects ecosystems and the communities that depended on them.  And that was a real career highlight for me!  Actually it  was a real golden year in my journalistic career. This was 2018 and I  was very grateful that Reuters had hired me because I’d actually just had my daughter Matilda and I actually-really needed a job.  I’d written a book on soldiers and trauma a few years earlier, and  I’d been freelancing and writing some some stories that I was pleased with, but I wasn’t really  making much money and it was I was very fortunate to be rehired in 2018 to  work on that project which was extremely enjoyable.  Working with a wonderful editor called Kari Howard who actually  was a very well-known editor at the Los Angeles Times and very sadly died a few years ago…but was an amazing  colleague and I really have such a fun memory of that period.

And off the back of that very successful project I was hired in a role as climate correspondent, so covering the beat,  covering the news, writing features, interviews and so on, and for a time I felt that this was an enormous break for me in that Reuters is obviously a huge  organization, it employs 2,500 journalists around the world,  and it forms the foundation of a lot of the news that you see on the Internet, or maybe watch on television. It has a really powerful systemic role in the media system globally, and so I felt that being hired into this climate role at this moment was a huge privilege. In 2019 when there was a real awakening of awareness around the severity and urgency of the climate  crisis. It felt almost like destiny calling;  it felt like I was being put in a place where I could potentially have an impact, and of course that’s a very seductive notion to any journalist. So  for a time, I felt it was going well: I was working hard, I was doing my best to find stories that would move the needle, as they say.

“But it became clearer and clearer to me that  the management was not really interested in the kind of climate coverage that I felt was our responsibility to deliver.” –Matthew Green, DeSmog

And what I mean by that is the climate crisis is essentially a story of a fight a fight between the fossil fuel incumbency and its enormous reserves of wealth and power and influence, to essentially maintain the status quo, for a few more years, to make as much money as possible, against the forces of disruption, ranging from the climate activists, to the renewable energy industry and many other disruptive technologies, progressive politicians, social movements, all kinds of forces  that form this loose global coalition that are fighting for a livable future. And so to me the role of Reuters was to really focus on that fight, to illuminate the vested interests standing in the way of climate action, and to understand the forces of disruption trying to topple that incumbency before the clock ran out on preserving a liveable biosphere. But Reuters did not seem to share that perspective and I never felt that the senior leadership were really able to  grasp or really understand what was required and demanded of the organization at this time. And that it just wouldn’t be possible for me to write the kind of hard-hitting climate accountability stories that I felt it was incumbent upon Reuters to be delivering. And I’m afraid that I feel like my intuition has been born out.  It’s quite difficult when you look at Reuters to see much in the way of climate accountability journalism, certainly relative to the size and power of the organization:  This is a this is an organization that makes $520 million a year in recurrent revenues, but they’re not really players in the climate accountability sphere. concluded that I had to look for work elsewhere and I was very fortunate to find a role as an editor at DeSmog.

What is the difference in the working environment of working at DeSmog, compared to Reuters?

It’s hard to really overstate the contrast between these two organizations,s and although nominally I’m in both cases,  I’m a journalist covering the climate crisis and the difference is like  night and day. I was moving from a huge global organization, which,  despite  its long failure to really grasp the climate story, was still very well-regarded and has global name recognition: You tell people that you’re a Reuters journalist, that immediately has a certain cache and status attached. And of course, it’s much better paid than working in the nonprofit sector, with enormous resources and access, the huge privileges in many ways that go with that kind of role, and DeSmog is just a tiny organization in comparison. I think we had a call with most of our staff the other day and there was probably about 30 of us around the world— a vast majority are freelancers working part-time, and even I work four days a week;  I don’t work five days and we’re a very loose network structure,  a very flat hierarchy.  Obviously it’s much less formal in a structure like DeSmog with a very light footprint, than a huge authoritarian corporate environment like Reuters. But I think much more importantly it’s the values that we hold, and the understanding of the story that we’ve developed.

DeSmog was founded in Canada in 2006 by a PR professional called Jim Hoggan who was so disgusted by watching his colleagues in the PR industry spinning on behalf of Big Oil, propagating climate science denial  and muddying the waters around policy, that he set up DeSmog to mame and shame them effectively, to deter them from working to advance climate denial and delay on behalf of oil and gas companies.

So we’ve understood from the very  beginning that the role of journalists at this time is to point out the way power and money is used to prevent policy on climate in line with what the science demands and that that’s just in our DNA.   

But to make an argument like that at Reuters, I was viewed actually with a lot of suspicion.  I was called an activist for presenting the story in those terms, whereas I Ifelt that actually the problem with Reuters was that they had become activists on behalf of the status quo, activists on behalf of oil and gas.But I sleep easier working at Desmog. I feel like the understanding of the story and the moment we’re in aligns with my own understanding. And it’s a place where I feel like the journalism I’m doing is a reflection of my core values, rather than a product designed to satisfy a corporate agenda, or essentially to make more money on behalf of Reuters and its parent, ThomsonReuters.  So as I say, it’s hard to overstate the contrast between being a corporate journalist at Reuters and working for  a climate nonprofit like DeSmog.

Right now, as many of us know, community media outlets are either struggling or have closed their doors.  Some have sold out.  And yet, there are still groups of community media outlets and journalists working very hard to figure out the so-called ‘new game.’  How can media balance creative freedom in reporting and financial stability?  But it’s not easy.  And I believe it requires a new story.  So here’s a story I recall: I knew this very witty and outspoken music industry executive who was responsible for discovering and signing performing artists such as George Michael and Wham!, and  several others.   So he takes me on a tour of the various departments at Universal Records in New York.  He says: “See these offices, these are all the promotion and publicity people.  They’re the marketing department.  And over here….here’s the A&R people.  They’re responsible for finding the talent for the label.  And over here, here are the top executives.  And of course, the legal.  And they all share one thing in common: Their jobs are to keep their jobs.  They don’t rock the boat!  If they did that, they’d be out of their nice, comfy job.  So their jobs are to keep their jobs. Journalists and media outlets need to understand that at times like these, their jobs are not to maintain the status quo—but instead, to rock the boat!  To take real editorial chances.  Because It’s no longer business as usual.  This is a time when real opportunity exists.  But not everyone sees it, and they are missing the point.  Their jobs are to keep their jobs—and that’s why people are cutting their cable cords, refusing to support establishment media.

What do you have to  say to the new group of social entrepreneurial activists, young people who want to see the news cater to what they need. How would you inspire them? Or is that too much of a long question? 

It’s a great question and I would almost flip it the other way around: A it’s really I’m drawing inspiration from younger people, like I’m amazed at how the generation, say 20 years younger than me, is conducting itself, and and the level of wisdom and creativity and innovation that I see, and even intellectual confidence. I have friends who were in that age bracket who just blew me away. They’re just so smart, and they are building their own media systems, and this of course didn’t exist when I was starting out. I mean, of course we just about had the internet when I first walked into a newsroom. I didn’t have a mobile phone: There was a mobile phone in the office that we would borrow to take take out on assignment.

Like the older phones that were the size of an electric typewriter?

It wasn’t quite that bad, but it wasn’t long since it would have been like that. I do remember though a friend of mine who used to work at Financial Times: I worked in Nigeria for the Financial Times years ago, and he’d been there a little bit before me, and I remember him telling an anecdote about how he would phone up the newsdesk and say he’ filed his story by email, and the desk would tell him: “I’m sorry the email person isn’t in today. Could you send it by fax? So you know this wasn’t that long ago. So it’s often the media that has been rather slow to catch on to technological trends. But that of course isn’t the case for the young generation. And you know, I can’t follow the level of innovation that we’re seeing, and how new social media platforms are developing new models, new ways of raising revenue. And I’m not saying that it’s necessarily all easy, or that  the pathway to a healthy media ecosystem is clear and guaranteed. But I do feel that there’s an enormous amount of incredible innovation that is happening that inspires me. And all I  would say to that generation is just keep doing what you’re doing, and I can come and hang out with you.

It’s community: I that what I’ve really learned in the the last few years  is that community and healthy relationship is really the most protective and supportive factor that we can avail ourselves of, and especially if we are in an organization, or in a company, where we know deep down that the values that the company is living by are not the values that we hold, and that essentially by participating in that company we are complicit in activities that actually we we do not condone, and there are many of us who are in that position. In fact, we’re all in that position at some level because we know that we’re living in societies and economic systems that are entirely unsustainable. And we are seeing the indications of stress and even accelerating collapse in many cases, occurring more and more frequently. So we’re all on the Titanic in a sense. But the question is: Do we choose to lull ourselves to sleep In the First Class berths? Or do we join those who are frantically bailing out and trying to patch the hole, or at least getting the lifeboats ready?  It’s not easy. It’s very easy when you’re in a comfy position in a corporate environment to tell yourself it’s all okay, or that there’s no choice – that it’s the best option. It’s a psychological mechanism that the therapist Sally Weintrobe calls “disavowal”. It’s where we know something to be true, but we act in the opposite direction anyway. And we somehow rationalize that we compartmentalize. So for example, I can be the editor-in-chief of Reuters, and I can know that we’re in a climate crisis, but I can sign off on the company organizing enormous conventions or trade shows for oil and gas executives in Houston under the Reuters banner to accelerate production of oil and gas – all the while maintaining that I’m running an impartial news organization that is ready to speak truth to power. And I can hold those two contradictory positions simultaneously through that mechanism of disavowal. And it operates in all of us at different scales at different times in different ways. So I’m not holding myself out to be actually any different from anyone who still is in that system. I was very fortunate, in that a doorway opened for me that allowed me to step out. Although I pay a price, certainly financially, I took the decision that it was better to take a bit less money home in my paycheck than to feel my soul slowly corroding.

But I also recognize that I was very well resourced. I had a very supportive wife who was 100 percent with me on that decision. And I’d had the opportunity to do a lot of inner work that allowed me to orient myself to a sense of “inner knowing”, shall we say. Maybe we could even speak about a soul connection, or a sense of working uh on behalf of something bigger than me. Although I hesitated with the path that I took at times, I always felt at the core that I was doing the right thing, that I would be okay at some level. I had a faith that things would work out, but I can understand that a lot of other people don’t have that faith, and and therefore it seems unconscionable that they would sacrifice a cozy position in the corporate system to pursue truth, or to pursue work more aligned with their really their core values.

So I have a lot of sympathy for people who are stuck in that position because I was one of them for a long time. So I have no judgment. But to return to your original question: I feel that creating communities, where we can have this conversation, where we can acknowledge uh what my friend Stephie Bednarek, the climate psychologist, talks about: the “undiscussability” of what’s undiscussable. Like at Reuters, the idea that we shouldn’t be hosting oil and gas conferences was undiscussable. But it wasn’t just undiscussable: The fact that it was undiscussable was also undiscussable, just like layers of undiscussability between us and the actual reality of our predicament. So we need communities where we can discuss the undiscussable and we need to foster that and create that.