When Dallas energy magnate T. Boone Pickens said recently that President Obama has been “a complete loser for energy,” the energy reporter at The Dallas Morning News quickly struck back. An article with multiple charts was produced showing that oil and gas production had risen while prices had dropped on the president’s watch. The story, in effect, implied that Pickens was talking out of his … well … his hat.
Now, though, a writer for Forbes magazine has taken the DMN to task for “misleading” reporting. Pickens’ comment “got the goat of some of the president’s media defenders,” David Blackmon writes. “The Dallas Morning News, as an example, chose to publish a misleading piece” about the production and price picture. The article was bogus, he goes on, because Obama had “nothing to do with any of those outcomes.”
The president is well known to be anti-fossil fuel, Blackmon writes, beating the drum instead for renewable energy sources (most disastrously with the Solyndra fiasco). Importantly, though, the shale oil and natural-gas boom has come largely on privately owned lands in states like Texas. In other words, Blackmon says, places where Obama’s feds couldn’t mess things up if they tried. The Forbes writer’s conclusion: Pickens—in stark contrast to The Dallas Morning News—was “absolutely, 100 percent correct.”
