Lee Wasserman, Director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, has changed his story again in a new op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, now claiming that his organization had no involvement in the Columbia School of Journalism’s anti-Exxon stories. This comes less than a month after his op-ed in the New York Review of Books where he admitted to paying the Columbia journalists to specifically target Exxon.

For Wasserman’s LA Times op-ed, the editor notes, “The [Rockefeller Family] Fund has made grants to the Columbia Journalism School’s Energy and Environment Reporting Project and InsideClimate News, but has no involvement in articles they produce.”

But in the December 8^th issue of NY Review of Books, Wasserman wrote,

“With help from other public charities and foundations, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), we paid for a team of independent reporters from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism to try to determine what Exxon and other US oil companies had really known about climate science, and when. Such an investigation seemed promising because Exxon, in particular, has been a leader in the movement to deny the facts of climate change.” (emphasis added)

Wasserman is trying to have it both ways depending on whatever best suits the argument he’s trying to make at that moment.  One moment he takes credit for the anti-Exxon “journalism” his organization pa...