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Newsweek: We didn't vet wind power op-ed

Newsweek didn’t vet the author of an op-ed piece critical of wind energy who turned out to have ties to oil groups, the magazine’s managing editor told the On Media blog on Wednesday.

The piece by Randy Simmons, published on April 11, questions the true cost of wind power to American taxpayers. And though the original article mentioned that Simmons, in his role as a professor of political economy at Utah State University, receives funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and Strata, a 501 c3 non-profit organization, it failed to mention his connection to the Kochs and Exxon-Mobil.

According to Newsweek managing editor Kira Bindrim, a note was appended to the piece after Media Matters flagged Simmons’ connections. The editor’s note now reads:

“The author of this piece, Randy Simmons, is the Charles G. Koch professor of political economy at Utah State University. He's also a senior fellow at the Koch- and ExxonMobil-funded Property and Environment Research Center. These ties to the oil industry weren't originally disclosed in this piece."

(Simmons told The Washington Post's Erik Wemple he is no longer the Charles G. Koch professor of political economy, though he currently currently supervises a program known at Utah State University as the “Koch Scholars” program.

According to Bindrim, the oped came to Newsweek by way of a syndication relationship with several opinion sites, including the site that originally hosted Simmons’ piece The Conversation.

“Admittedly, we did not do an outside vetting of Simmons, and we are not in the habit of fully fact-checking opinion pieces picked up like this from outside sites. These are aspects of our workflow that we're looking at now,” Bindrim said.

The piece also had several factual errors, which the wind lobby group American Wind Energy Association and others flagged in various online posts. Newsweek then corrected the errors and published a counter-oped, titled “The True Benefits of Wind Power” by Jim Marston, the founding director of the Texas office of Environmental Defense Fund.

Hadas Gold is a reporter at Politico.