It’s been a long time since we have seen a news outlet prop up the failing #ExxonKnew campaign, but MSNBC did its best last night.

The segment, featured on “All in With Chris Hayes,” included commentary from the usual cast of anti-fossil fuel and anti-ExxonMobil activists: InsideClimate News reporter Neela Banjeree, and Harvard researchers Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran. It also regurgitated the same cherry-picked and biased information that activists have hurled on the social media accounts for years.

As a reminder, dozens of newspaper editorial boards and third-party experts have opined on the #ExxonKnew campaign, highlighting aspects that should make members of the public raise an eyebrow. For example, as a former state attorney general for Washington wrote last year, “it is becoming increasingly clear that Exxon has been unfairly maligned by a group of activists and lawyers driven by politics but bereft of facts.”

In an effort to fit the #ExxonKnew narrative into the “Climate in Crisis” reporting program to which MSNBC has been adhering, the network failed to acknowledge a simple truth about the campaign: after four years of investigation and countless hours spent pursuing failed lawsuits, the claims made by #ExxonKnew backers are simply untrue.

Before there was #ExxonKnew, there was InsideClimate News and Neela Banerjee

The only third-party commentator featured in the segment – creatively titled “Exxon knew about climate change long ago” – is Neela Banerjee. This is notable, as Banerjee is the InsideClimate News reporter who led the outlet’s initial investigation into ExxonMobil in 2015 from which the phrase “Exxon knew” evolved.

It’s important to note that ICN is far from an objective news source. For example, the outlet receives funding from both the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Rockefeller Family Fund, organizations that have played and continue to play an instrumental role in several aspects of the #ExxonKnew campaign, including pushing litigation against the company. Additionally, the website’s publisher, David Sassoon, is not shy about the kind of news he expects ICN to publish, writing on DeSmog Blog about his passion “to make history by working hard and doing what I can to usher in the clean energy economy.” (emphasis added)

Additionally, prior to the publication of one of its #ExxonKnew stories in September 2015, Sassoon emailed an embargoed version to several staffers at Climate Nexus, a Rockefeller-backed PR firm. A Climate Nexus staffer then emailed a group of activists calling for government prosecution of climate skeptics, adding that the #ExxonKnew story would provide the “perfect news hook” for their effort to go after “deniers.”

This sentiment was reflected in Banerjee’s commentary on the MSNBC segment. Unsurprisingly, she reiterated many of the long-debunked talking points perpetuated in her #ExxonKnew series reporting, stating:

“[In 1988] Exxon started to recognize that the UN and others were going to come up with maybe a global policy that would cut back on greenhouse gas emissions and that was going to affect their bottom line. This wasn’t a remote issue anymore, it was something that they needed to address now and they chose to address it by playing up the uncertainty and using a narrative that went counter to science.”

Banjeree’s conclusion – that the company’s narrative on the topic of climate “went counter to science” – in the video and her initial reporting, is based on excerpts from company documents that were cherry-picked. This selective version of the past was designed to lead the public to believe the outlet’s pre-established conclusion: that ExxonMobil misled the public on climate change

In addition to misrepresenting facts, Banerjee was also dishonest about how she and her team came to acquire the internal ExxonMobil documents cited in the ICN investigation. Since it published its Exxon series in September 2015, ICN pushed the narrative that its reporters “uncovered” the documents from scientists in the company, stating that they were “top secret” and totally unavailable to the public.

In reality, many reporters were able to find all these documents precisely because they were widely available in libraries and online. Much of the research they “uncovered” from company scientists was published in peer-reviewed journals. Still, after this was exposed, Banerjee continued to tout how difficult it was for her team to get their hands on the documents, telling the National Press Foundation:

“There’s probably a couple thousand pages and we have digitized maybe two or three dozen so far as part of stories. And we are very cognizant of the fact that people took risks in sharing these with us and so we don’t really talk about how we got the documents because we believe in protecting our sources.”

Cherry-Picked Documents Were Debunked Long Ago

One of the documents featured is an internal ExxonMobil memo published from 1979, which according to MSNBC, “warned that present trends of fossil fuel combustion with a cool emphasis will lead to dramatic world climate changes within the next 75 years and that CO2 buildup in the atmosphere is a worldwide problem.” Unsurprisingly, this document also featured prominently in Banerjee’s ICN investigation. However, on the first page of the report, ExxonMobil makes clear that this is not a definitive conclusion, as the scientific community was less than certain on the issue:

“It must be realized that there is great uncertainty in the existing climatic models because of a poor understanding of the atmospheric/ terrestrial/ oceanic CO2. balance. Much more study and research in this area is required before major changes in energy type usage could be recommended.” (emphasis added)

Also cited in the segment are three of ExxonMobil’s New York Times advertorials, along with a 2017 study from Harvard researchers Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran that accused the company of using the advertorial to mislead the public on climate change. However, Cleveland State University Professor Kimberly A. Neuendorf, Ph.D. – whose methodology on content analysis Oreskes and Supran cite throughout their study – rebutted to the report. As Neuendorf wrote, the data analysis the Harvard researchers relied on is “unreliable, invalid, biased, not generalizable, and not replicable.”

Additionally, Energy In Depth conducted its own review of the advertorials and found that Oreskes – whom the New York Times credits as one of the architects of the #ExxonKnew campaign – and Supran only examined a small sample of all of the advertorials that ExxonMobil had published in the paper. Further, it found that rather than sourcing these documents from the NYT’s online archive, Oreskes and Supran retrieved them from Greenpeace’s PolluterWatch database, the website established by Kert Davies, founder of the Climate Investigations Center and one of the board members of Climate Liability News.

The Public Nuisance Litigation

In the segment, MSNBC also mentions that several municipalities, the State of Rhode Island and a group of crab fisherman have filed public nuisance lawsuits against ExxonMobil and other energy companies. The segment fails to give any context to or details about any of the cases.

From MSNBC’s reporting, viewers wouldn’t be aware that three of these lawsuits – those filed by San Francisco, Oakland and New York City – have been dismissed at the federal level.

Indeed, when Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed the San Francisco and Oakland climate lawsuits, he stated that climate change is a global issue requiring a global solution. Therefore, this is not a matter appropriate for the judiciary:

“It is manifest that global warming would have continued in the absence of all California-related activities of defendants. Plaintiffs have therefore failed to adequately link each defendants’ alleged California activities to plaintiffs’ harm.” (emphasis added)

Similar to how the public nuisance lawsuits were reported, MSNBC failed to provide any color on the investigations and lawsuit brought by the New York and Massachusetts attorneys general against ExxonMobil, both endeavors that are more about politics than the law, as several experts and editorial boards have noted:

“The first thing to know about the crusade against Exxon by state attorneys general is that it isn’t about the law. The second thing to know is that it isn’t even about Exxon. What these liberal prosecutors really want is to shut down a universe of their most-hated ideological opponents… The goal of the Exxon probe isn’t to protect consumers or help the environment. It’s a message: Oppose us, and we will marshal our terrifying government powers to intimidate and threaten you, to force you to spend millions defending yourself, to eat up the time you’d otherwise use speaking out.” (Kimberley Strassel, Columnist, Wall Street Journal, 6/16/16) (emphasis added)

If MSNBC’s segment were intended to be an objective report, it would have articulated the shortcomings and political background of these lawsuits. But it wasn’t intended to be objective, which by this point should be self-evident.

M is for Misleading

MSNBC’s “Exxon knew about climate change long ago” segment is based on a biased article and crafted with cherry-picked documents, which were seemingly delivered to the media outlet by the very activists trying to take down ExxonMobil and other energy producers.

Climate change is a complex global issue that requires a global response. As such, the public should be able to turn to the media as a resource with which to educate themselves – not be fed a biased, activist narrative. In producing such a one-sided story, MSNBC is only muddling the waters for everyone.