Confirmed: Rockefellers Admit Funding Pay-to-Play Attack “Journalism” Against Exxon
Friday December 2, 2016
After over a year of continuous denial, two members of the Rockefeller family appeared this morning on national TV to own up to the fact that they specifically paid the Columbia School of Journalism and InsideClimate News to write hit pieces on ExxonMobil, in what can only be characterized as a pay-to-play attack on the company.
A segment that aired on CBS This Morning with Charlie Rose featured interviews with David Kaiser of the Rockefeller Family Fund and Valerie Rockefeller Wayne of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, reporting:
“The charities [the Rockefellers] run funded investigations that appeared in the Los Angeles Times and InsideClimate News.”
In yet another sign that the Rockefellers have suddenly decided to embrace their bankrolling of #ExxonKnew publically, NPR published a column over the weekend by Marcelo Gleiser who even attributed the hit pieces to the Rockefeller Family Fund, not InsideClimate or Columbia. As Gleiser put it,
“The investigative report from the RFF is quite clear in its findings.”
This admission is especially striking considering that the Rockefeller foundations that are bankrolling this campaign – primarily the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Rockefeller Family Fund – have maintained that they have “hands-off” relationships with InsideClimate and Columbia, and therefore didn’t exercise any editorial control over the results of their Exxon climate “investigations.” As Lee Wasserman of the Rockefeller Family Fund said in an interview with Reuters last March,
“No specific company was targeted in our push to drive better public understanding and better climate policy.”
That same month, InsideClimate News reported:
“Rockefeller Family Fund Director Lee Wasserman said the charity supports public interest journalism, including InsideClimate News, but keeps at arm’s length from th...
