On October 24, the News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal published an article under the headline “Fracking Isn’t as Popular (or Important) in Pennsylvania as You Think.” “Politicians—and the press—often act as if support for extracting natural gas from shale is essential to electoral success in the state,” the article notes. “But polls show that Pennsylvanians, like other Americans, are about evenly split on fracking,” it continues, adding that “there’s little evidence that voters in the state are deciding how to cast their ballot based on the candidates’ positions on the issue.”
For months, Fox News has been pushing the idea that support for fracking is a litmus test for the presidency — a narrative that was also a staple of the network's coverage in 2020. During the week leading up to that election, Fox repeatedly pushed the narrative that Pennsylvania would be won or lost by the candidates’ stance on fracking.
Fox has seemingly based this narrative on misleading claims that the fracking industry is a significant employer in the state. For example, last month, Fox & Friends host Ainsley Earhardt argued that the fracking industry supports “423,000 jobs in the state of Pennsylvania.” On October 23, Fox & Friends hosted Tim Stewart, president of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, who claimed “there are 425,000 jobs in Pennsylvania … because of fracking.”
According to a September 13 fact check from public broadcaster WHYY, “The state of Pennsylvania reported about 26,000 direct jobs in the oil and gas industry in 2020, less than 1% of all jobs in the state. Four years later, that number is even smaller.”
This figure seems to be more in line with reality than the inflated estimates of industry sources, The Wall Street Journal reports, noting that “these purported job numbers are delusional.”
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reaches a very different conclusion, finding that direct employment from Pennsylvania’s fracking industry amounted to just 18,636 jobs last year. By comparison, the School District of Philadelphia alone directly employs about 20,000 people. Fracking doesn’t even make it onto Pennsylvania’s official list of top 50 industries for employment, and a county-by-county review shows that even where fracking is prevalent, the share of jobs it provides is in the single digits.
If we assume that each fracking job indirectly supports two additional jobs elsewhere in the economy (a multiplier that many energy economists endorse), the number of jobs associated with fracking still only totals about 55,000, based on the BLS figures. At that level, the petroleum industry provides less than 1% of the state’s 5.8 million jobs, slightly fewer than Walmart.
The Journal also explains a separate reason that the national media obsession with candidates’ positions on fracking is so bizarre.
